Our formal statements were short, generally 10 minutes each, but were followed by an hour or so of energetic exchange. A few members of the audience at our panel (“Academic Perspectives on Serious Games”) asked for a transcript of my comments, so I thought I’d annotate them and post them to the blog.

May 28th, 1:30PM

Good afternoon. My name is Garrison LeMasters, and I’m a Visiting Assistant Professor on the faculty of the Program in Communication, Culture, and Technology at Georgetown University. I’m grateful for the opportunity to speak with you today.

As has been amply and ably demonstrated this morning, the use of games and gaming technologies for training, for education, for policy-making, for research and for and outcomes-forecasting is clearly an idea of some significant mass. Over the past decade or so, it is an idea that has generated a lot of press, some useful research, and more than a few market-ready terms like “gamification” and “funware.”

I completely agree that there are interesting conversations to have about “the benefits of digital games beyond entertainment,” and that it’s worth exploring “the practical use of games,” I worry that this represents a markedly limited way of thinking about the intersection of games, technology, and institutions like the Department of State.

Indeed, in extremis, I worry that it points to a fundamental impoverishment of human freedom.

Let me begin by acknowledging that — beyond even those affinities Special Representative Pandith noted this morning — it is worth pointing out that sophisticated, “serious” games and play have long been important to the work of diplomacy and statecraft: Role-playing, for example, is a staple of the diplomat’s toolkit. So is the generation of “as-if” scenarios; the plotting of alternative histories; the use of minimax-style decision-making is literally derived from Game Theory. Indeed, the philosophy of “play” is the basis for the utopian fantasies that make diplomacy a meaningful activity in the first place. Fantasies that allow us to ask: How else might our world appear?

So then let me then echo Ben Sawyer in observing that “All games are serious,” and substitute “serious issues” for serious games. For brevity’s sake, I want to point to three serious issues that loom at the intersection of games and the business of the Department of State: Sovereignty, governance, and playbour, and then make a more general comment about serious games and human freedom.

1. Sovereignty.

A decade ago, Ted Castronova identified Norrath as having a GNP per capita somewhere between that of Russia and Bulgaria, higher than that of China and India, and noted that a unit of EverQuest currency was worth more than the Yen or Lira. Given the inevitable rise in the populations of places like Azeroth and Norrath, and their booming economic footprint, for how long will the terrestrial nation-state remain our de facto unit of political sovereignty? I have a complex basis for this question that involves Plato, poetry, and the invention of the alphabet, but let me elide that in favor of a few observations. Go to Google, and type in the letters “AZER,” and what do you see? The first suggestion is Azerbaijan, a Republic in Caucus mountains of Eurasia. The second suggestion is Azeroth, which is of course the world of world of warcraft. Ted Castronova has done a good job of discussing this from a public policy perspective in his book Exodus to the Virtual World. But I think that you saw it this morning in the opening talk of Arjun Sethi, who repeatedly suggested that national boundaries were largely banal, and instead built products that addressed linguistic, cultural, and social affinities.

Which leads to my next issue.

2. Governance.

Who’s in charge here? What are the models of governance that we should adopt in these virtual worlds? How should real states treat virtual states? How should virtual states treat real states? A number of today’s presenters, for example, lauded the ability of games to argue and persuade, and to foment positive social change, but they did so while making clear arguments that few would find objectionable: Save electricity, save the world, oppose totalitarianism. But what happens when virtual states go rogue? I think that the recent antics of Anonymous are useful here.

My third issue:

3. Playbour.

How shall we think about the rapidly developing phenomenon of “liminal ICT work” or playbour (a portmanteau of “play” and “labor”)?

While, admittedly, early reportage on the practice of gold-farming was probably more a function of Western anxiety about Chinese economic growth than it was a careful survey of reality, a number of reputable scholars, including Richard Heeks, Vili Lehdonvirta, and organizations like the WorldBank, have recently contributed to a more robust picture of “liminal ICT work.”

According to Lehdonvirta’s recent Knowledge Map of the Virtual Economy, “An estimated 100,000 young, low-skilled workers in China, VietNam, and throughout the East, earn their primary income by harvesting virtual resources” from Azeroth’s fertile lands.

Gross revenues of the gold-farming services industry were pegged at approximately $3.0 billion in 2009, most of which, according to the World Bank, was captured in the developing countries where these services originated.

It gets more complicated when we dig deeper: On Wednesday, for example, Britain’s Guardian newspaper raised the specter of coerced playbour in Chinese prison camps.

Which brings me to my final issue, which is largely philosophical:

4. Freedom.

As others have suggested, “serious games” are nothing new. But what does that mean, really? In earlier cultures, in better times, games were instruments of knowledge production and management. Think of tarot cards and yarrow stalks. The gods themselves played games, not to entertain themselves, but, in Heidegger’s phrase, to world the world.

Our renewed interest in games restores some of that luster, but it does so with an instrumentalist twist: In the era of serious games, our play has a purpose. Learning, social change, emancipation, profit.

I would suggest that, much like the relegation of games to pure entertainment, this is an impoverishment of the form.

Ideally, every game is an instantiation of human freedom. There is a deep, resonant power in our shared willingness to put aside every law of the universe, all of the interpersonal pressures of class and society and gender, all of the constraints of mortality and being, and share an unnecessary game of checkers.

We may certainly think of an online game about geopolitics of the second world war as an attractive alternative to a dry lecture, but for the student, who cannot choose not to play the game, there is only more work. We may think of the DoD’s deployment of a virtual Iraq for acculturation as an improvement on previous methods of instruction, but we would do well to remember that it is not a game, because the soldier cannot choose.

Serious games certainly look like games, and certainly draw upon the complex mechanics and proceduralism of games and the rhetoric of play, but they are, finally, instrumental. Intentional. Political. Which is not suggest that they are not worth pursuing, but to suggest instead that even as we prepare to face down virtual nations, and slap tariffs on Real Money Transfer, and involve the US in three-way negotiations with China and the Dwarves of Iron Forge, we recognize the richer human experience of a disinterested game of checkers.

An Exodus Recession?

“I thought we would not see a real-world recession caused by the removal of consumption energy into virtual environments until sometime in the far future. But I didn’t think about the possibility that the term ‘virtual environment,’ in its economic meaning, might expand to environments as diverse as Hulu and Facebook. Are people now spending enough time fiddling around with digital stuff that their interest in physical stuff has weakened to the point that it catalyzes an ongoing cycle of economic pessimism? Perhaps not. But some trends certainly point in that direction.”

I’ve been arguing lately that games and gamic technologies are not sites of emancipation and freedom, as others would have them be, but that they offer, like Deleuze’s highways, only the appearance of freedom.

This terrific clip of a young man playing Joy Ride with his Kinect is a fantastic illustration of this illusory freedom. Watch the young man remain stone still throughout the game, and still come in third place: We are being gamed, my friends. There is no emancipation here, even on the open road: Just the preprogrammed appearance of it.

“Calling pro wrestling ‘fake’ is neither accurate nor informed. The term is ‘kayfabe.’

Kayfabe isn’t a euphemism for false. Kayfabe is specific to pro wrestling, and it means everyone – athletes and fans – getting the story straight without saying so. It’s a conspired narrative that you can’t acknowledge is unreal, like a hilarious family secret whose official version changes when your drunk uncle shows up sober.”

I’d never encountered this term before, but I can’t help but feel there is a lot to consider here: Immersive, collective, self-consciously pretensive agon, at once methetic and kathartic. I’d say it out-Antigones Antigone. Deeply interesting. (Wikipedia, predictably, is useful, but the OED is clearly immune to the considerable charms of Rowdy Roddy Piper et al.)

Fall is supposed to be the best time of the video game year, the entree and the dessert after the first nine month’s meager salad and interactive appetizer. But in 2010, the winter and spring were bountiful and fall is at risk of seeming pathetic. Could it be? These are your fall games of 2010.

Blog Kotaku has this recent note about how Vail is gaming the slopes with RFID tags:

“Starting this November five popular ski slopes in Colorado, Utah and California will start tracking powder time to award skiers achievements pins and the ability to level up.

EpicMix goes live on all but one of Vail Resports’ slopes this coming ski season. Keystone, which opens on Nov. 5, will be the first to see the new RF-enabled tech in action. The resorts using the service this year are Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Keystone and Heavenly.

Starting this season all Vail Resort season passes and PEAKS lift tickets with an RF logo on the back will be equipped with EpicMix. Every time you use your pass or ticket your stats will automatically be captured and uploaded to the EpicMix website. There are also mobile phone apps in the works for the new tech.”

Via Kotaku

Most important night of the year Halo coming out at 12 tonight and yes I’m in a line to get it…

via Kotaku

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.

As an aside: The RSA Animate series is marvelous — I hope that high schools are making use of these. It even makes Zizek’s unflagging misanthropy look like fun. (Although you should know that, in my own experience as his student — consistent with stories my colleagues tell — Slavoj Zizek is an earnest, warm, and generous man).