B4GD

The post semester blues are always a strange thing. Typically, I go off and just sit in quiet for a while reflecting on what I’ve learned and where it’s taking me but this time I am trying to be a bit more proactive and write about it so that I may learn more. So, it’s time for a theoretical exercise.

In keeping with the previous post, I am interested in what people playing video games and people making video games are discussing. I am further interested in what they do not agree with and the discrepancy that exists between the intent of a game maker and the way a game player interprets that intent. You could also say, the way the game maker intended the game to be played via their system and how game players play the game using that system.

As this is supposed to be a theoretical exercise, I wanted to base my thoughts on something that came up constantly through this semester. I keep looking through my paper trail on Bruno Latour and getting hung up on a chapter in Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. In this chapter, a conversation between a Doctoral Candidate and Latour takes place. The candidate has come to Latour to ask about Actor-Network Theory and wants to see about using it in his thesis, as it is “hot stuff”.

I’m cutting out a lot of this for fear of infringement but this is the part that always makes me think. S is student, P is professor (pages 151-155).

S: But I have to make the actors learn something they didn’t know; if not, why would I study them?

P: You social scientists! You always baffle me. If you were studying ants, instead of ANT (actor-network theory), would you expect ants to learn something from your study? Of course not. They are the teachers, you learn from them. You explain what they do to you for your own benefit, or for that of other entomologists, not for them, who don’t care one bit. What makes you think that a study is always supposed to teach things to the people being studied?

S: But that’s the whole idea of the social sciences! That’s why I’m here at the school: to criticize the ideology of management, to debunk the many myths of information technology, to gain a critical edge over all the technical hype, the ideology of the market. If not, believe me, I would still be in Silicon Valley, and I would be making a lot more money – well, maybe not now, since the bubble burst…But anyway, I have to provide some reflexive understanding to the people…

P: …Who of course were not reflexive before you came to honor them with your study!

S: In a way, yes. I mean, no. They did things but did not know why…What’s wrong with that?

P: What’s wrong is that it’s so terribly cheap. Most of what social scientists call ‘reflexivity’ is just a way of asking totally irrelevant questions to people who ask other questions for which the analyst does not have the slightest answer! Reflexivity is not a birthright you transport with you just because you are at the LSE! You and your informants have different concerns – when they intersect it’s a miracle. And miracles, in case you don’t know, are rare.

S: But if I have nothing to add to what actors say, I won’t be able to be critical.

P: See, one moment you want to explain and play the scientist, while the next moment you want to debunk and criticize and play the militant…

S: I was going to say: one moment you are a naïve realist – back to the object – and the next you say that you just write a text that adds nothing but simply trails behind your proverbial ‘actors themselves’. This is totally apolitical. No critical edge that I can see.

P: Tell me, Master Debunker, how are you going to gain a ‘critical edge’ over your actors? I am eager to hear this.

S: Only if I have a framework. That’s what I was looking for in coming here, but obviously ANT is unable to give me one.

P: And I am glad it doesn’t. I assume this framework of yours is hidden to the eyes of your informants and revealed by your study?

S: Yes, of course. That should be the added value of my work, not the description since everyone already knows that. But the explanation, the context, that’s something they have no time to see, the typology. You see, they are too busy to think. That’s what I can deliver. By the way, I have not told you yet, at the company, they are ready to give me access to their files.

P: Excellent, at least they are interested in what you do. It’s a good beginning. But you are not claiming that in your six months of fieldwork, you can by yourself, just by writing a few hundred pages, product more knowledge than those 340 engineers and staff that you have been studying?

I have been thinking about this passage and the underlying messages of legitimacy, relevancy and imposed structure and how it relates to video games. Specifically, I have been thinking about the function of a system in a game.

My argument comes in the form of several different perspectives. First, the game designer has power over the gamer in that they can impose whatever system they choose. Second, the story within a video game is often ancillary and merely a function to serve the system a video game uses (e.g. Halo’s FPS system is there to provide a means through which Master Chief can accomplish amazing things by himself or with another Master Chief, RPG systems are often created in much the same way as their pen and paper counter parts in that they serve to emulate the growth of power needed to defeat the big bad).

That said, sociological perspectives are mostly synonymous with video game systems. In conflict theory, one group must always be in conflict with another, the group in charge must always maintain their power by convincing the other that it is a good idea, functionalism must always take a portion of society as necessary for the whole (albeit the dysfunction of a portion of society opens a few of these doors). Video Games often recreate basic iterations of these theories. We often have an oppressive regime that needs to be taken down or something that comes in to oppress / destroy us all.

It’s all about perspective here. Living within a specific framework in sociology shields us and blinds us from seeing arguments from other perspectives. Sure, we can go and do another study using a different framework, but this second study is another step in darkening our blinders. We could compare conflict theory and functionalism but all we would learn is that in one system, 1 group is subjugated by another whereas in functionalism one group is supposed to be lower as there are always people that need to be under others. As you can see, we merely compare the two perspectives and move on, not learning about the group we are interested in so much as how the two systems conflict and contrast. We don’t ask the people we are studying what they feel from their perspective. We simply impose social theory on a group already having a multitude of other things imposed on them.

In other words, the system through which we see the world shields our eyes from seeing a group of people in different ways.

This is a function of ANT. It attempts to close these gaps by taking us from the top looking down and puts us into the same level as the actors we are studying and let’s us view all action and trace associations. ANT acknowledges the social world by allowing it to act fully. Through ANT, no longer would sociology be preformed to plug groups into without asking or looking at that group’s action. Moving on to video games.

ANT as a perspective for game design is interesting. The discussion between S and P could just as easily be a discussion between a Game Designer and P. The messages of the discussion work as a metaphor for game play and game design.

Like social theory, a game designer has to choose what frame they want to stick a game into (FPS, SRPG, RPG, Platformer, etc). A game’s story, a game’s narrative, isn’t really what drives the story. The story is bound to the rules of the engine it uses; certain choices, certain design decisions are dependent on the limitations of that engine. However, where social science is free to approach ideas from a wide variety of frames, video game makers are not. Video game makers are stuck on the consoles that exist and may only use the engines that are made to work for those consoles or are limited by budget to develop their own in house engine.

Consoles add another level of complication. Comparing it to social science, this would mean that I could only base my theory on ideas created from a language that wasn’t my own, using ideas that aren’t my own. Further, the lifeblood of the video game industry is money and this means that games must be made according to what the markets demand. Experimentation is low because of this.

Now, I know the first thing that will be said here is that there are games where the story matters. The only thing I can say here is that there are always exceptions. The exceptions deserve discussion, but not here. The argument I want to make is complicated to me. It may not be complicated to you but I am new to this idea so I wanted to get this out of the way. Video Games are a combination of interactive storytelling, games, play, and fun. This combination of things has existed in multiple forms throughout history but this one has taken shape in the so-called ‘modern society’ so we have what exists in front of us.

So, there are two mediating variable that exists inside each and every video game, engine of the game and system the game is on. Whether it be an in-house engine customized for a game system or an engine purchased and customized to fit the needs of the maker, the engine of a game is the nuts and bolts of the player’s experience, the story is ancillary or is adjusted to meet how well the system works on the console or machine it is intended for. It has been this way since the first video game was created.

I tried to think of a better term than mediating variable, but it works.

In statistics, a mediation model is one that seeks to identify and explicate the mechanism that underlies an observed relationship between an independent variable and a dependent variable via the inclusion of a third explanatory variable, known as a mediator variable. Rather than hypothesizing a direct causal relationship between the independent variable and the dependent variable, a mediational model hypothesizes that the independent variable causes the mediator variable, which in turn causes the dependent variable. The mediator variable, then, serves to clarify the nature of the relationship between the independent and dependent variables.

The mediation variable has a tremendous affect on the player’s enjoyment of a game. It depends on a huge range of other independent variables. Person making the architecture that runs the game, the person making sure that architecture can exist inside the console that is running the game, and the people that make sure that those two are communicating enough to make a coherent product.

This issue has become more and more of a problem as consoles have become more complicated. The gap that has been growing in development time, money spent on development and failure is causing the same types of problems that sociology currently has. In essence, the stale nature or tired portion of constant innovation and ‘progress’ has created a growing want for a ‘revolution’. Or, you could say that I feel the Atari / Arcade machine created methodology of video gaming that was perpetuated by PC and home console makers is about to reach its critical mass.

In Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn writes (92):

Political revolutions are inaugurated buy a growing sense, often restricted to a segment of the political community, that existing institutions have ceased adequately to meet the problems posed by an environment that they have in part created. In much the same way, scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, again often restricted to a narrow subdivision of the scientific community, that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way.

I believe that there are several things going on here. One, the state of innovation in video gaming has been two fold but necessarily limiting. More code can be processed faster thus allowing for a higher resolution for display and artificial intelligence in the way it has always been programmed. This innovation has been extremely limiting in that it has cut off more and more people who would play video games until all that is left is a single demographic, males between the age of 18-35. This limiting effect has begun to taper and lose hold as the resolution approaches life like possibilities.

As we reach the point whereupon the uncanny valley seems to be within reach, the need for innovation in other aspects of video gaming increases. Getting back to ANT, the need for game makers to actually listen to their players is increasing. You can see this beginning to take place in the type of games that are managing to reach sales figures that surprise most fans of games to the point of criticizing them. The rest of the world, separate from the narrow niche of people who have been purchasing games, are ready for a world of electronic games that, like they say, are easy to play and hard to master.

While user generated content is silently making its way across all platforms and various types of games in an attempt to do just that, it is still limited to the system that the game employs. For example, I can choose now if I want to be a woman or a man from a certain city and my stats change or I can build a level in Little Big Planet, but I am still restricted to the system that the game employs. I have little to no control in the actual content of the game, I can even make myself a fat, horrible person in Fable II. Here to, is a revolution waiting to happen.

The growing issue created between engine and console is made clearer here. If I have complete control of the content of a game, I am limited to my own imagination but restricted by the engine the game employs. I could just as easily be horrible at this as I am at basketball and no amount of predictive work the engine may employ will help that. User created content depends on the creative nature of the user and looking back through history, the amount of inspiring, creative, people is very small when compared to the rest of the world’s population. Video Game makers need to expand their influences past video games that have come out before they began making their own game.

In the words of Roger Egbert:

I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

Egbert here is making an argument that video games teach us nothing culturally. There are arguments to the contrary but as they are mostly limited to the scholarly realm, they do not often make it to popular culture in a noticeable way. Perhaps someday the scholarly work will matter; however, the problem with video game is that most games come from a culture that isn’t our own and are devoted to a singular idea delivered through an engine they probably didn’t make.

Wrapping this up, Video games are stuck in a variety of ways. Games are: dependent on the current state of technology, dependent on other people creating engines that allow them to create a game they want in the way they want it, stuck making games the way that games have always been made, stuck spending more and more money to deliver games to an audience that grows smaller and smaller, further limited by design camps that are more and more inclusive and are thus limited in innovation due to their tiny audience. This fits in well with my wanderings in Sociology as it is experiencing similar issues.

Video Games are stuck between several different cultural ideas. They are seen as escapist and often immature things that are meant for a specific audience. They have a movie connotation to them now that the life like nature of their graphics is becoming more apparent. Fiction rules are applied to video games because games are meant to be a way to tell a tale that is fiction but the rules with which the games are made are almost in opposition of the rules of fiction and thus limit the type of people that would enter into making a video game at all. Movie tie-ins and movies made from video games are often horrible and serve to widen the gap that video games can be seen as a proper work of fiction.

So, until someone can come in and destroy these preconceived notions, shorthands for narrative (genre rules), the video game may well be excluded for not creating its own method of telling a story with its own artistic merit. Until game makers can get past their own self-imposed limitations and try to create messages that actually talk about something in society past the already established media, video games won’t matter as much as they should, or could.