gamestate

Here’s a course description for the new graduate course I’ll offer next fall at Georgetown. Frankly, the course is a work–in–progress, and so the semester is still a bit blurry. Still, I’m excited about the early drafts of a syllabus, which will draw on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, robotic vacuums, gospel choirs, Aristotle, horror films, Star Trek fans, and Grand Theft Auto IV (among others).

Fall 2009 Garrison LeMasters
CCTP-628 Interactivity Immersion + Play

Is interactivity a property of the medium, or a perception of the user? How do the affordances of immersive technologies resituate our experience of the world? Is play an inherently innovative or derivative activity?

Interactivity, Immersion, and Play are three of the most widely-cited, but poorly understood, affordances of “new media.” With an emphasis on video games, simulative technologies, and “2.0” narrativity, this synthetic course will consider these three interrelated concepts from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including the historical, philosophical, rhetorical, technical, and aesthetic. We will weigh theory against praxis, supplementing scholarly and philosophical texts with weekly case studies of interactive technologies, immersive environments, and playful design.

During the semester, students will write and publish a work of interactive fiction (IF) using Inform, a natural-language design system.

The course will culminate in the public presentation of experimental interactive installations designed and built by the students.

Last month, I finally joined a guild in World of Warcraft: Bound by Blood. Actually, that’s not quite it: ßøuñ∂ ߥ ßløø∂.

Guilds are like that. But in this case, typographical idiosyncrasies aside, it’s been a rewarding adventure so far, and I’ve learned a lot from it. Take, for instance, the character of in-game guild text chat. Outside of a guild, the chat channels in WoW are full of snarky, silly chatter. In my guild, at least, chat is (1) constant, (2) situated both within and without the “reality” of the game, and (3) unfailingly supportive.

Level up? “Congrats” pour in from all around. New achievement? “wtg.” Getting camped by some level 20s? “I’m on my way.” Once you’ve played WoW in this fashion, going back to solo seems an unappealing option.

D. Linda Garcia and I, together with Hanan Gazit at H.I.T., will serve as guest editors for a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research. In addition to regular papers, the special issue will feature some of the papers presented at the SLACTIONS conference in late September.

The metaverse is emerging, through the increasing use of virtual world technologies that act as platforms for end-users to create, develop, and interact, expanding the realm of human cooperation, interaction, and creativity. The conference focus is scientific research on applications and developments of these metaverse platforms: Second Life, OpenSim, Open Croquet, Activeworlds, Open Source Metaverse, Project Wonderland, and others, providing a forum for the research community to present and discuss innovative approaches, techniques, processes, and research results.

For more information, see the JVWR site. (And be sure to check out their new issue — guest-edited by Mia and Mark and featuring, among others, a nice article by Burcu and a roundtable with amazing Sarah and brilliant Liz).

How much “fun” will NASA’s much-touted Unreal 3-based MMO be when it is released next year? If the captions to still images released on developer Project Whitecard’s website are any indication, not much.

Here’s how they describe the Regolith Grinder (aka “The Taurus”):

“Contructed from an advanced smelting process and lunar factory, it is a general-purpose vehicle with a plow option.”

Maybe things are more exciting over near the Moonbase?

“The centre of operations for Moonbase Alpha, this inflatable, reinforced structure is the core. Look at the scale of the extensible walkway system!”

Nothing says “I can’t wait to play this” like “extensible walkway system.”

Raph Koster revisits his book on A Theory of Fun as he points to Loodo’s Calabouço Tétrico, a highly-polished, deeply disturbing Flash-based Tetris variant that replaces colored blocks with human beings in different states of distress.  Speaking of it on his website, Ian Bogost points back to his text, Persuasive Games (wherein he rejects as inferior those games whose mechanic is not “tightly coupled” to its narrative) (see also this post).

In short, Calabouço Tétrico demonstrates how narrative can overdetermine the mechanics of gameplay — no matter how familiar those mechanics may be:  As Tetris becomes a dark exercise in body stacking, the pleasure of closure that should come with every completed row quickly dissipates.

The New York Times’ Seth Schiesel has a nice review of GTA’s new downloadable expansion, the evocatively named biker scenario The Lost and the Damned.

Schiesel gets it right, I think, when he observes that

All sorts of games are about visions of power, often accompanied by violence. But most titles are set far away from what most people would consider the real world….

Most designers fear… questions [about social responsibility]. Rockstar Games, maker of Grand Theft Auto, does not. The company appears to recognize that it is not necessarily irresponsible to portray the real world’s underbelly. After all, Americans love gangsters and criminals in their entertainment. Americans even like to see the bad guys win once in a while.

I’d go a bit further. Beyond “not necessarily irresponsible,” I see GTA as a reasonably sophisticated meditation on cruelty and contemporary America’s lack of empathy. The horror of the “real world’s underbelly” is hardly the point of GTA: It’s the inhumanity of its glossy surface.

At the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Chicago, a behavioral sciences professor from Northwestern University has called into question the idealism of much of our rhetoric on the potential diversity of human networks in MMORPGs.

“Social Drivers for Organizing Networks in Communities” appeared as part of a panel called “Analyzing Virtual Worlds: Next Step in the Evolution of Social Science Research.”

The findings are interesting. According to VWNews:

A group of researchers recently took a look at social habits inside the MMOG Everquest II. Their findings show that players tend to associate with others from their nearby geographical community. Obviously, gameplay heavy MMOGs like Everquest attract a different user than more open-ended or social worlds like Second Life or Habbo, but habits like that could present a challenge to creating international, large-scale communities in virtual worlds.

“People end up playing with people nearby, often with people they already know,” social scientist and engineer Noshir Contracto said in a statement. “It’s not creating new networks. It’s reinforcing existing networks. You can talk to anyone anywhere, and yet individuals 10 kilometers away from each other are five times more likely to be partners than those who are 100 kilometers away from each other.”

Via Virtual Worlds News, “Research Shows Worldwide MMOGs Not Very Cosmopolitan”

Trying to discover a little bit more about ethics and the nature of malevolence in MMORPGs, I rolled a new Horde character: Badflower. I’ve made it to level 8, and this much is clear: In Warcraft, there are the Good, the “bad,” and the silly.

WoW’s two factions are the Alliance and the Horde: Your standard Human / Elf / Dwarf power trio pitted against the Orcs, the Trolls, and the Walking Dead. But whereas Tolkien and others in the literary tradition clearly see this as a contest between good and evil (and even Good and Evil), WoW equivocates. Good, yes: Alliance characters (human, anyway) make frequent reference to light and righteousness. But Evil, not so much: Horde characters include the Undead and spells make frequent use of demons and imps. But these are not malevolent. Sometimes they are “bad,” and frequently merely “different.”

Indeed, the idea of the Horde as some overwhelming, ubiquitous evil is frequently skewered. On one recent outing, for example, a horrifying giant ogre asked me to help him fetch “gloom weeds” for an zombie apothecary who had built him with leftovers from the graveyard. After a considerable effort, I brought the gloom weed to the frightening skeletal pharmacist, who complained, loudly, that he wanted “doom weed, not gloom weed.”

There is no evil here. The Horde is just like the Alliance, except the Horde’s narratives are infused with irony and humor.