What Does it Mean to be a person that study's games?

It's crunch time in grad school. I have many many pages to write before the 11th. Once the 11th comes, i'm hoping to switch this format from freeflowing ideas to well researched or at least partially researched ideas. That said, I wanted to think about what it means to study games.

Studying games is an interesting thing. My discipline, sociology, has a well established speciality called "The Sociology of Sports and Leisure." Almost all ideas of what play is are contained within this little thing. Most of the study here revolves around sports (as the name implies). It looks at how games are socially constructed entities that are given life by the fans who constantly reify their passions.

I look at this stuff, i know very little about it, and I think about what it means to study a video game. Let's talk about video gaming versus professional sports in monetary terms.

I'm linking to gamespot because I didn't want to go searching for the dataset that gave them their numbers. The gaming industry as a whole earned about 21 billion dollars. If you look at professional sports, the average nfl team earns about 30 million dollars a year. Both of these numbers are always going up.

The difference here is pretty staggering. And here is where opinion comes in. Sports like this are still mainly associated with a locality. They are our team and they represent our feelings and our beliefs. When I lived in Ohio, the Browns were everything in the entire world. Bernie Kosar was our god.

Now, with video games, you don't really get this. We have nothing to associate ourselves with in terms of the locality of a game, where it was made, or even what it means to us. Video games and sports also differ in that sports fans are everywhere, and games fans, unless they are games about sports, are sort of in the minority (although growing).

Sports, and the ideas of sports, have been around for a very, very long time. It's had time to become refined and made clear. It's had time to create standards and standard ideas in terms of how trends flow. It's had time to create the standard rules of play and from it, the standard rules of the professional. It's even had time to create different classifications of professionals and different classes of amateurs. Each of these has a place and one can get through them with enough work (and luck).

Video Games haven't had time to do any of this. Our standards fall within years, our professionals are mocked and the stuff of our jokes (when's the last time you referred to the world video game champ?). All of these things are things, ways, we're trying to mock the way everything is now.

Basically, I wanted to get into an argument about the standards of becoming a recognized professional organization. We see some of it happening within gaming and I believe this is the wrong way to go about it. Gaming, and the way games are made, lend themselves to this sort of contest when the game itself is mimicing an already put in place sporting event.

Now, that said, what about the study of these things?

Well, game studies, game critiques, sort of work off of the same principles. You have groups that are going around trying to create programs within already developed disciplines and trying to create another sub-discipline that will allow them to study games.

However, since these games are cross culture, since these games are cross genre, and cross everything else that we have in terms of borders and ideas within disciplines, we have to try and find a way to get all of these disciplines, all of these ideas, to suddenly work together when they've been trying to keep them seperate for the past few hundred years.

So what does it mean to study games?

Well, before we can really get into the study of games and gaming, we need to sit down and think about what a video game is. We need to chart how the games have changed, what the major changes have been, why those changes have happened, and what these changes have meant to the idea of the video game as a whole. Next, we need to study the type of gamers that have existed at each change within the idea of a game. We also need to associate ourselves with the hitorical changes that were present during these changes. We need to associate ourselves with technological change and how these changes have themselves informed all of the other things.

Then we need to talk about these things ad nauseum and with as many different types of people as we can and we need to get them talking to each other about each person's perspective on gaming.

And lastly, we need people who haven't grown up as fans of video games, come in and try and study us from the outside. And it wouldn't hurt if they ended up really find us interesting.

So why talk about all of this stuff? Why even bother to type it out? Well, you see a lot of this happening around the net. You see basic ideas and conversations happening again and again and again. These conversations are tiring, but these conversations are very very important. We need to identify what they are so that we may slowly create a course of learning on what it is that we're trying to say.

From the interactions of the masses, an identifiable whole will appear. We need to be able to trace the connections of each interaction, and further, we need to identify why each of these interactions is important.

In doing this, we can finally start teaching it. If we can start teaching it, we can finally communicate what it is that we've all been writing about, thinking about, and obsessing over for the past 25 years.

A response to: Beyond Good and Evil and Photographic “Truth”

I had initially meant to type this as a response to Chungking Espresso but it ended up being far too long so I tried to rework the train of thought here and let her rip. The impulse here was on relevancy as a medium. My train of thought in creating this was fringe creation of a technological innovation that made it to mainstream quickly as a fad, died out from oversaturation, but has managed to become a huge multibillion dollar industry and symbolizes a part of the drive for more resolution on our televisions and perhaps the re-establishment of the idea of "play" in society. The comment took the form of relevancy cannot be achieved if games are too complicated to play, the stereotype of the gamer is lacking romance, and unintended collaboration between game maker and console maker is forced.

I have been wondering about gaming as social commentary lately and this post really touches on some of it. Relevancy as a medium has got to be possible considering how much money is being funneled into the industry but I just can't see it happening any time soon. There is so much that needs to be overcome before anyone can play a game. I seem to be harping lately, on input, but with so many buttons and complex manipulation of the controller, if game companies want to reach a wide variety of people with their message, it's going to take an awful lot to do so. Confusion and distraction with regard to knowing what button to press is incredibly difficult to deal with; especially if it comes during the moment the message of the game is 'revealed.' Beyond Good and Evil created this consequence for me quite religiously.

Perhaps this is my own glaring weakness as a gamer but I felt that BG&E was boring to play; and when the action started it was confusing to understand. I felt like I was playing Lost Vikings or Abe's Odyssey (of course I know this is wrong, but it is what it felt like). I have attempted to play this game something like 20 times but each time, I lose interest quickly and run off to play something else. I know I can play complicated games; I love Nobunaga's Ambition, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and other simulation games. In any case, it is this sort of thing that ends up being indicative of my critique of gaming as a whole. Also, it seems to me that games, video games, have quite a few things to conquer before they can really get past the "Jack Thompson" solidified stereotype.

I keep wondering why my brain goes to this with regard to critical game studies. I think that it does this because I don't see how games can actually accomplish anything outside of play, fun, or competition, until we manage to really get established as part and parcel of the mainstream pop culture. You could make an argument about games already being there but think about each time a game makes it into the news. Violence, Star Wars premier like behavior at the launch of a console or game, and maladjusted social behaviors that serve to show everyone that 'gamer lives here.'

There is no romance in the gamer stereotype. There is no romance in the game programmer stereotype (in this country). Whereas writers and artists can live in tiny rooms, creating the most amazing things for us to look at and read, a gamer sitting in this tiny room and creating games for us to play are looked upon as losers and idiots (unless you make a game live Cave Story or Braid). Until enough games come along that manage to make critical acclaim in so much that people like Roger Ebert call it amazing, I doubt that the social commentary made will be worth it. The reason I think this keeps on perpetuating itself seems to be that the very idea of play is something that is meant for children and animals (Homo Ludens).

Play seems to be returning and I think that society is read for gaming to sort of allow us to explore our selves more fully in a way that has been unthought of for almost 3 centuries. However, as with every time a spirit of wonder has appeared in the world, war seems to take that spirit away. Many of the things that are around in society now indicate change (we're waking up, beginning to care), but it could just as easily go the other way.

It's nice to see though. A note on generalizations. The problem with generalizations is that everyone is always an exception. My entire career has hinged on learning how to make the proper generalization from enough data. I try to do this but I have a habit of never citing the things I am pulling from. I hope to start doing so once I have more time to really give research to posts as opposed to stream of consciousness. I feel that both exercises are extremely fruitful. Opinions and ideas without solid data allow us to challenge our own beliefs and really look at what is going on. Approaching from bias with possibility of being completely wrong seems to be the only true method to get results, and inform ourselves.

On the Black Box

I wanted to write a bit about the Black Box. The Black Box is a term used in the "Science Studies" that refers to an area that, because of its success, we don't ever think about; that is, until it breaks down. I wanted to think about Video Games using this term. It may end up that I am forcing this term on the game, but I think that it has enough familiarity to lend itself to discussion. Black Box is defined as (and this is how it changed into the Sociological term):

“...used by cyberneticians whenever a poece of machnery or a set of commands is too complex. It its place they draw a little black box about which they need to know nothing but its input and output.” (Latour: Science in Action: 3)

“The assembly of disorderly and unreliable allies is thus slowly turned into something that closely resembles an organised whole. When such a cohesion is obtained we at last have a black box.” (Latour: Science in Action:131)

The Black Box is interesting because of how it came to be. "The assembly of disorderly and unreliable allies..." is referring to each individual part that makes a thing. In a computer, or in a video game console, these allies can be processors, fans, anything that makes the machine go. Each individual part is assembled and looked on by experts. Those putting the machines together might not know how each part works individually, but they've put together a series of allies in order to create a whole that is used as a vessel for the games it plays.

Each generation's console puts the latest innovations in chipset / graphic processing into their machines. The conglomeration of allies that they use, even though they are hardware, determine the software that the console manufacturer must use in order to use the hardware as it is intended (if this is wrong, please tell me where I went astray). This basic "how-to", ever since the PS1, has been part of an ongoing issue.

Each dev kit is not radically different but is different enough that copatibility issues with past games are proving to be more and more difficult to maintain. Each generation, the Black Box of the newest console is opened and while exploration is fast and furious, the development kit of each of the generation's consoles are not fully realized until just before the console is ready to be replaced with a newest black box. Constant redesign in order to use the newest available hardware constantly force developers to rework the way they understand how to design games.

This ties into a recent discussion of the idea of the word design. From here:

“I would argue that design is one the terms that has replaced the word “revolution”! To say that everything has to be designed and redesigned (including nature), we imply something of the sort: ‘it will neither be revolutionized, nor will it be modernized’. For me, the word design is a little tracer whose expansion could prove the depth to which we have stopped believing that we have been modern.”

There are a lot of things going on in this quote. First, modernity and the ways we believe ourselves to be modern is born out of the idea that we are always progressing and are SO much better than our primitive ancestors. One of my favorite quotes from Georg Simmel is something akin to "Our material culture has inarguably changed over the past 100 years whereas behavior has not". We'll go from here and move into design.

Modernity implies a variety of ideological changes. The definition from wikipedia is:

At its simplest, modernity is a shorthand term for modern society or industrial civilization. Portrayed in more detail, it is associated with (1) a certain set of attitudes towards the world, the idea of the world as open to transformation by human intervention; (2) a complex of economic institutions, especially industrial production and a market economy; (3) a certain range of political institutions, including the nation-state and mass democracy. Largely as a result of these characteristics, modernity is vastly more dynamic than any previous type of social order. It is a society—more technically, a complex of institutions—which unlike any preceding culture lives in the future rather than the past. (Giddens 1998, 94)

The problem with this definition is that most of it is simply our technology. We haven't really changed that much. In this sense, modernity is still processing. This is an important concept when referring to the idea of design.

If Latour is right and design does indeed beg for and is synonymous with "revolution" then this is another mode to point at our still modernizing selves. Games that we play are still being recalibrate and rethought, retooled, and rediscovered. Each console's engine is explored and tooled with but we are still all playing super mario brothers or doom or any of the first games with a new skin. The games that actually move the entirity of the gaming industry forward are as few and far between as truly breathtaking innovations in just about any field in existance.

When game systems become stable, complex, or good enough to not have to be tooled with as an engine, I believe that innovations in game design via narration or impulse of the character will become more important. It is these things that people want to explore in gaming. Each game that is sallied forth by whatever respective camp, has a shallow character given depth by factors the player cannot control. In essence, our character's depth is given a priori but we might not know it until we finish the game.

We have a long way to go before the black box of the console is fully resolved. This black box, this pandora's box, while it has been around for some 30 years, still has a long way to go before the system can settle for new ways of gaming. I believe this is what critics of the idea of "Intelligent Game Discussion" are getting at. The technology we use isn't stable enough to allow for true discussion of what a game is. For all they know, we are all still playing Super Mario Brothers; and I tend to agree with them.

What Happens Before Game Design?

As the bio on the side tells you, I am a Graduate Student working on a degree that should end up in Applied Sociology. I have many interests, Games, Culture, Technology's effect on Education, and the effect of play on the way things are. In this blog, I want to talk about the things that go into the design of a video game. I'm not interested in level design, system design, narrative design, i'm interested in the entirity of the design process that occurs before a game is begun. Designers pull from culture, that thing that we create through our billions of interactions and localizations each and every day. We create it through newspapers, television shows, government systems, churches, bathrooms, toasters, and everything else that interacts with us in some way shape or form. What is it that is at work when we turn on a game? Are the designers pulling from a common pool of culture? Are they pulling from more than just mythology and morality? These sorts of questions are what i'd like to explore. 

Moreso than this, I want to explore exactly what it means to design a video game. When a video game is made, we often take an earlier game, monopoly, chutes and ladders, candyland, or things like Doom, Dungeons and Dragons, or Cops and Robbers. Through this, we will get into the fundamentals of play in culture. With things like The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia by Bernard Suits, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element of Culture by Johan Huizinga, and Man, Play and Games by Roger Caillois i'm hoping to add another layer to discussion of play. Further, my discussions will be using what is referred to as the Sociology of Associations. Bruno Latour and his discussions on the fundamentals of Sociology have produced a theory that everyone but him called Actor-Network Theory. While he has begrudgingly agreed to call this theory as it has been labeled, he takes great pains to try and create an instrument through which we can trace the associations between actor-networks. 

An Actor-Network, to be brief, is, "...what is made to act by a large star-shaped web of mediators flowing in and out of it. It is made to exist by its many ties: attachments are first, actors are second..."

Attatchments imply possession; these possessions also possess us, "to have is to be held." Latour was fond of the puppet / puppeteer metaphor. Current social theory gives no autonomy, no agency to those whom exist inside society. Through Latour's work, actors are still puppets, but like a pupeteer, the puppet is as much an actor as the pupeteer has sway over the puppet. Through this, we will see how games control us, move us toward innovation in gameplay as much as the game creators try and translate what it is the gamers want. We will be trying to explore what this association is doing to the state of play within video gaming. 

Further, we will try to broaden the field of discussion of the video game to include the games that failed. Why is it that some games fail while others do not? Why is it that some games are released to be a commercial property with horrible bugs and destructive save states? There are studies that look into this sort of thing, but I think that discussion about it is still constructive. The more we know about what has failed in the past, the more we'll understand about the things that have succeeded. In this way, we will talk about the constantly changing concept of design. While I am not going to stick with just one social theorist, I believe what Latour says of the concept of design:

The sheer range of things now subject to it — objects, cities, and everything in between — shows just how momentous, and total, this shift in production promises to be. And yet, he observes, the connotations of design imply a certain ‘modesty’: it’s less about construction and creation than informed modification and collaboration. To design, Latour points out, suggests redesigning, and improving, something that came before, opposed to working from scratch in solitary, ingenious confinement. It is, thus, recursive and remedial, favoring skill and attention to detail over bold, inaugural ideas that lack accountability.

Thusly tooled, I am going to try and write at least three times a week. The impetus for the blog is to force myself to write about these subjects. I am hoping that, in doing this, the background of my practicum will find itself made more real.

I thought I had finally come to understand the message of the grasshopper

"Why should creatures who do not know themselves to be grasshoppers, and who have been playing games thay they do not know to be games, suffer annihilation upon discovering that that is what they've been doing; and why, if they are playing game3s don't they know it?"

I've been reading The Grasshopper from Bernard Suits. It's a strange book and really meshes well with the messages and ideas of Homo Ludens. It's just a shame that so much wisdom has to be wrapped and delivered in a way that is so maddening. I suppose this is the way with philosophy as a discipline, overly wise folk above us so much to the point that a mere riddle will free us from our mortal coils. 

This got me thinking about some things; namely, progress. The Bijker developed concept of the seamless web consists of an unbreaking and unnoticable web of technical, social, economic and political elements to technological developments. This became part of the SCOT frame but also exists within the ANT method. For Video Games, I think this is an important thing to think about.

Ever since we decided to stick some games in some vaccum tubes, we've been obsessed with technological 'advancement'. This typically has meant that things 'look' better. It has never meant that things 'played' better. Sure, there have been some improvements in play through things like hit detection, artifical intelligence, and controller movement, but these things are all part and parcel of the look of a game. My Rainbow 6 Vegas guy can't move or look like Mario, but I still do a lot of the same things that Mario does. 

My question is, "When will this unending chain of technological advancement begin to truly include advancement of the social realm of gaming?"

The interesting thing here is that while there is a social aspect to gaming, the social messages within gaming are never that complicated. "My girlfriend died so I need to bring her back." "My friend got killed so i'm going to find the guy." "Princess got kidnapped again!"

I think that I can bring together a few things i've been reading and hearing around the net to talk about messages in games. Resident Evil 5 is often touted to be callous toward racial relations in other countries aside from it's origin; Nevermind the fact that Japan has some of the most horrible inequality in the world with regard to women. I was listening to Brainy Gamer, pod cast guests N'Gai Crol and Manveer talk about various other types of characters in games (Around 40 minutes in the GDC Volume 1). We can't see this kind of message within gaming until someone, somwhere, goes out of their way to start developing the narriative of games.

An interactive piece of fiction allows us to explore some of the most interesting scenarios we could imagine. The only issue is that we are so reliant on the latest and greatest thing that we take too much time programming the system these things exist in and forget to put in believable ambiance to make that system feel real. There is more to a situation than the flappyness of my pretend priest outfit in Assassin's Creed. 

In any case, I can only hope that the systems after the current gen take a direction away from MORE POWER, and actually demand from their 3rd Parties, games that make us actually feel something. 

I need to start posting these before it's time for bed so I can keep the ideas clearer. 

The Magic Circle, Immersion and Fun

This debate is carried over from Brainy Gamer. It is a complicated idea; but then, all ideas at this level is complicated. The thing that makes them fun is that we're all trying to figure all this stuff out. It can be exasperating, splitting hairs, taking issue with metaphysical impulses that come a priori, but it's the ability to make those distinctions that really lets a person know they're starting to understand things. Well, I think so anyway.

Alright, so the issue here is the Magic Circle:

As to the magic circle, I agree with it from the sociological stance taken by Homo Ludens; however, I don't know if it works (or should work) in practice, or if it needs to be either more developed or battled against (that is, forcing the player to connect their game experiences with the real world).

The comments there were getting rather long so I thought i'd bring this idea here. I think it's relevant enough to really write more about. Huizinga defines the Magic Circle, as he does all things, by creating meaning around the word and hinting at its meaning. In defining the magic circle he talks of (pps 56-7). This will be a long quote but I wanted it said in context, not in summary:

All these forms of contest betray their connection with ritual over and over again by the constant belief that they are indispensable for the smooth running of the seasons, the ripening of crops, the prosperity of the whole year.

If the outcome of a contest as such, as a performance is deemed to influence the course of nature, it follows that the particular kidn of contest through which this result is obtained is a matter of small moment. It is the winning itself that counts. Every victory represents, that is, realizes for the victor the triumph of the good powers over the bad, and at the same time the salvation of the group that effects it. The victory not only represents that salvation but, by so doing, makes it effective. Hence it comes about that the beneficent result may equally well flow from games of pure chance as games in which strength, skill or wit decide the issue. Luck may have a sacred signicicance; the fall of the dice may signify and determine the divine worksings; by it we may move the gods as efficiently as by any other form of contest. Indeed, we may go one further and say that for the human mindthe ideas of happiness, luck and fate seem to lie very close to the realm of the sacred. In order to realize these mental associations we moderns have only to think of the sort of futile auguries we all used to practice in childhood without really believing them, and which a perfectly balanced adult not in the least given to superstition may catch himself doing. As a rule we do not attribute much importance to them...

...With many peoples dice-playing forms part of their religious practices. The dualistic structure of a society in phratria is sometimes reflected in the two colours of their playing-boards or their dice. In the Sanskrit word Dyutam the significations of fight and dicing merge....Very remarkable affinities exist between dice and arrrows...In the Mahabharata the world itself is conceived as a game of dice in which Siva plays with his queen...

The main action of the Mahabharata hinges on the game of dice in which King Yudhistra plays with the Kauravas...For us, the chief point of interest is the place where the game is played. Generally it is a simple circle...drawn on the ground. The circle as such, however, has a magic significance. It is drawn with great care, all sorts of precautions being taken against cheating. The players are not allowed to leave the ring until they have discharged all their obligations. Byt sometimes a special hall is provisionally erected for the game, and this hall is holy ground.

I take this metaphor to mean a variety of things. I'll write these meanings through the ideas of the MMO. Mia Consalvo writes of the magic circle:

Johan Huizinga argued that play occupies a time apart from normal life...and when a game is played it creates a space apart from normal space - the playground or "magic circle" where a special sort of order is created. That order is dependent on rules...All play has its rules...the rules of a game are absolutely binding and allow no doubt...as soon as the rules are transgressed the whole play-world collapses. The game is over."

While this magic circle is present for this game, the idea of the magic circle is indeed present in the ideas of play. Video Games have a magic circle that is very noticable; you turn it on. These magic circles are very delicately constructed and not every one is the same. For the MMO, the magic circle isn't the world that the game exists in so much as the system it uses to deliver that world. When the game's servers are first turned on, the magic circle is drawn and is drawn in a particular way.

However, this game of dice is a bit more complicated than that of two people rolling dice. The magic circle is used for so often and for so long that the boundaries of it, the careful construction of it, falls victim to what could only be referred to as the MMO equivalent of the telephone game. Players figure out that parts of the magic circle are weaker, or that the dice are loaded in a particular way and they do everything they can to tip the game in their favor. Afterall, a game which requires such odious amounts of time ends up creating an impulse to cheat that amount of time by any means necessary.

With this impetus thus created, a balancing act is created. It is as though the magic circle, while carefully constructed, hangs ever so delicately with both players trying, as in a Pinball game, to bump the ball in their favor.

The big thing here is that a market is involved. The game designers, those who created the magic circle need the game to continue. So, while they want the magic circle to be tipped in their favor, whereupon they have ultimate control over the system the world is delivered in, they cannot exert this control less the players all go to another circle. 

So, this situation is created whereupon the designers have to maintain a balance of play that is somewhat challenging to a group of players but is not so challenging; but also not so easy that it is insulting. 

So, the obligation of the designer to maintain balance in their favor while also trying to keep players wanting to play more, is the constant recalibration of the magic circle.

I think that makes sense. I'll try and clarify later after doing some classwork writing.

The Social and Science: Gamespace and Play-spirit.

So I read this sentence today and it made me think, "Cultural Relativism is made possible only by the solid absolutism of the natural sciences." This came in Reassembling the Social as Latour made headway in explaining why the Sociology of Science was necessary in the creation of a Sociology that works. To explain this idea he uses this example,

There may be thousands of ways to design a bridge and to decorate its surface, but only one way for gravity to exirt its forces. The first multiplicity is the domain of social scientists; the second unity is the purview of the natural scientists.

This little example rocked my world. For such a long time, i've thought of the social forces of our society as exerting influence in varying degrees. Some crazed social force that works from so many interactions at once that it is impossible to get a grip on. There is a problem with this though. While the natural scientists do employ rigid rules and structures to explore the world, the variety of forces that are explained by these natural scientists are vastly complex and even moreso, prone to misinterpretation. However, it is because of these rigid rules and rigid structures that we can actually take Science at its most literal and move forward to explain the social instead of using the social to explain some thing.

This is a vast, and probably over, simplification of a complex arguement. However, I believe it to be somewhat clear.

As with all of Latour's examples and ideas, i've tried to use this on video games. Almost all of our video games rely on Natural Sciences in some way, shape, or form. We have things like the vaccum of space, gravity, hunger, death, disease, and so on and so forth. We take these things as a priori assumptions. We know that if we have no more life, we are dead. We know that if we jump in the air, as long as we're not in space or something that can fly, we will be returning to the ground beneathe us.

It is this use of the explanation from natural sciences that creates a basic familiarity with the world around us. We know that we will die because we know that, like ourselves, we only have so much vitality in ourselves. If we are hit a couple times with a sword, we will die. If we fall off of a cliff, we will probably die. While it is true that we may live in some fashion or another, something changes.

In a video game, the things that change when we fall off of something, is either the amount of lives we have; a punishment for failure, or we have to continue on our path, more than likely a harder one (I am thinking here of easy paths up on top of a level whereupon falling means one will have to contend with a far more difficult path (Common to NES games)). It is this connection that has grown over the years. This need for realism was from the innovation, the translation of the programmers from their general thoughts on society, the innovation that if we make mor erealistic looking environments and levels that we actually feel more connected to the world that that character inhabits.

However, we come back now to an idea from Homo Ludens. I've been trying to make an assertion that Gamespace is the last real area for the play-spirit to inhabit. We've seen the rationalization of almost every other type of play-spirit out there. Sports are barely play anymore, even things like bowling, cards, and even chess or scrabble have their professionals. Gamespace is one of the last true play-spirits left in this world.

However, because of the want for us to keep this realism in our games, we are risking the rationalization of gamespace. Less and less we see fantastical characters in realistic games. The situations are often fantastical; I could not imagine the fun and glee of flying a harrier through a city to kill some people for James Woods (GTA: San Andreas), but the physics are real, the people are real, everything seems real.

Is this the play-spirit or is this the initial stages of the rationalization of gamespace and the end of the last realm of the play-spirit.

I think that perhaps I can answer this question...and that I should with the last few sections of this paper.

Power and Gaming: A Short Musing on Power

So we look now to power in ANT. It's a strange concept that I am just now getting into and one that I think really lends itself to the video game entirely. But first, criticism of sociology is abound in this section. Latour talks about the collection of phenomena needed to understand associations of power. He says that we need to learn how to not limit the actors within the social before they even start interacting. Indeed, looking at Conflict Theory, SI, Functionalism, and their ilk, we see society existing apart from the actors within it. The rules, ideas, and everything flow from this great invisible thing. In trying to look past the invisible thing, Latour says we can actually identify those phenomena that exist to create these asymmetries in society. If we limit ourselves, and state that these phenomena are needed to keep society going, that the social could not exist. He points to this example of the baboon.

"Still, I knew my work painted a picture of baboon societies that others would find difficult to accept. My shocking discovery was that males had no dominance hierarchy; that baboons possessed social strategies; that finesse triumphed over foce; that social skill and social reciprocity took precedence over aggression. This was the beginning of sexual politics, where males and females exchanged favors in return for other favors. It appeared that baboons had to work hard to create their social world, but e way in which they created it made them seem "nicer" than people. They needed one another in order to survive at the most basic level - the protection and advantage that group living offered the individual - and also at the most sophisticated level, one marked by social strategies of competition and defense. They also seemed "nice" because, unlike humans, no member of Pumphouse [the name of the troop] possessed the ability to control essential resources: each baboon got its own food, water and place in the shade, and took care of its own basic survival needs. Aggression could be used for coercion, but aggression was a roped tiger. Grooming, being close, social goodwill and cooperation were the only assets available for barter or to use as leverage over another babbon. Baboons were "nice" to one another because such behavior was as critical to their survival as air to breathe and food to eat. What I had discovered was a revolutionary new picture of baboon society. Revolutionary inf act, for any animal society as yet described. The implications were breathtaking. I was arguing that aggression was not as pervasive or important an influence in evolution as had been thought, and that social strategies and social reciprocity were extremely important. If baboons posessed these, certainly, the precursors of our early human ancestors must have  had them as well."

Through this example, we can see that Baboons have to be nice to each other to keep their constant social interactions maintaining the social thing that they have. In this way, their society can and has to exist. If it should break down, the Baboon's group will fail. We move from here to game space.

The creator of a game has absolute power over the part of the game that the player has to cope with. In Shadow of the Colossus we see a young boy knowingly going to what will probably be his death in an effort to ressurect some woman we only know was sacrificed. In Metal Gear we are stuck in whatever Kojima has decided will be Snake's environment. Indeed, we had to even watch the normal main character as the new playable character, "Raiden". In this way, we are powerless to the game creator. But, there is more.

In GameSpace, you could, say, as Snake, just stand there and do nothing. However, the game world doesn't move with you, the game world simply waits for you. It urges you to go on. You have to go on to see what happens next. Further, we are urged to perform well becaue a perfect score here just might mean an extra dialogue about the box Snake hides in or a new suit with incredible powers of camoflauge. 

So we are lead along a course of play that is created by a programmer who is lead along by a designer who is lead along by a project lead or head designer. We all end up the victim of whatever designer's decision might be made.

It's interesting to think about. A game could be hard because the designers want it to be. Or, a game could be easy and beautiful in an effort to just entertain the masses with a pretty project.