“Sometimes disobedience is necessary and good when rules fail us, and it’s at the core of why we hack. Hacking is a means of expressing dissatisfaction, confounding the mechanism, and ultimately doing better. Here’s why it’s so important.”

Criticisms and speculation about Zynga’s theft of ideas have been aired before, chiefly in tech-industry blogs that have remarked on apparent design similarities between Zynga’s smash hits — including FarmVille, FishVille, PetVille, Café World, and Mafia Wars — and predecessors published by other companies. But company insiders have never discussed the frankness with which Zynga, led by Pincus, based its lucrative business model on exploiting the achievements of competitors.

While you’re at it, be sure that you check out this recent piece, courtesy Gawker, on Zynga’s weirdly secretive “Platinum Purchase Program,” where a $500 minimum purchase nets players “bonus loot” (first-hand corroboration here), and see this overview of the Apple-enabled and Google-backed Zynga’s dark (virtual) world.

“I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel,” writes Zinn. Liszkiewicz points to Farmville, that scourge of networks, and sees some very successful little cogs.

Perhaps it seems a waste of time to discuss video games at a moment like this. After all, this is a serious discussion, and games are supposedly frivolous things. Most any concerned parent might say, “Play is an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money….”[1] So said Roger Caillois in his book, Man, Play, and Games. Of course, Caillois went on to praise games as a source of joy, as well as a healthy means of “escape from responsibility and routine.”[2] For Caillois, as for Aristotle, games are in fact essential to citizenship: they allow us to refresh and renew ourselves, help to socialize us, and afford us opportunities to cultivate our imaginations and reasoning skills.[3]

While it will not be the sole topic of interest to Arcade Theory in the fall, the politics of the procedural will figure prominently in our conversations. So take a look at Liszkiewicz’s talk, and spend some time lingering over some of his recent digital poetry, Count As One.

And then, if you’re interested, read more about CCTP 628, Arcade Theory. Be sure not to miss the latest addition, a suggested summer reading list of ready-to-print essays and articles (nothing too heavy, I assure you).

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.

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.

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.