Values and Aspirations

Ahh, morality meters in games. This entry is a little short, since I feel we've covered several aspects of games espousing a certain set of values throughout the course (America's Army comes to mind... over and over again). However, I do want to make mention of the use of moral accounting, as Bogost calls it, in RPGs. For example, in WoW, players are rewarded for espousing the values of certain factions within the game (destroying their opponents, saving allies from dungeons, providing desired items to "Turn-in" NPCs, etc.) with reputation-based rewards. For example, by battling the undead minions in the Plaguelands, rescuing captured members of the Argent Dawn, and turning in badges of honor, the players receive access to special weapons, armor, or craft recipes.

Similarly, in Mass Effect, selecting or deflecting certain actions or dialogue traits are rewarded later in the game with access to better weapons and quest rewards. Players are influenced in this manner to make their character's actions fit as close to tradtional "good" values as possible, since the rewards make completion of the main story line much easier. Moral accounting in this kind is ubiquitous throughout the gaming community, but most especially in the RPG sector. I believe that this is due to the company's moral integrity constantly being tested by outside influences, such as Congress or community watch groups, who often deride games as "immoral" or "evil." What I don't understand is why the companies don't simply point to these moral and behavioral control systems and say, "Look, we do support innovative and morally-based solutions to problems! You are punished for killing this guy and rewarded for sparing his life!" This is an experience I faced just yesterday while playing Fallout 3. I felt bad when I saw my reckless murdering of an adversary had taken a significant toll on an in-game NPC ally. There are plenty of scenarios in many different games which follow the same basic flow of events. Why, then, does no one talk about it?

Meta-play, metacognition, and procedural literacy

In beginning a question of education and training, it becomes important to understand what kind of education or training one is referring to. I am more willing to buy into Bogost's argument that videogames tend to teach players not only how to play that game but also how to manipulate systems. I've noticed that different types of games my friends play reflects directly on their professional and educational experience. Those who are more linear thinkers tend to play rail or curtain shooters, while people who have broader game experience tend to work in more diversified fields, such as mechanical engineering or biosystems engineering. Their experiences shape how capable they are with dealing with different kinds of procedures and different experiences, as well as how they process new information into their respective orientations. Players, as Gee explains, situate themselves within the space to solve problems. (p241) I'm reminded of Ender's Game, where children are challenged with increasingly difficult games, each designed to address different thought processes to force the player to make difficult decisions to address unusual circumstances.
In much the same way, players of Grand Theft Auto are given a wide range of procedures to apply to solving the problems in the game. While most (okay, all) of these procedures are highly illegal, the player is still challenged with developing new solutions within the restrictions of the game. For example, when a player runs over someone, a cop may start to chase him. The player can then try to outrun the cop, or back over the dismounted officer, or hide his car in a chop shop and pick up another one, among many other different solutions. There are different consequences for each of these solutions, but the player must decide and weigh the risks and rewards of each approach. A player can apply this same thought process in business or professional study, as Beck and Wade argue. Gamers tend to have better success because they can think more clearly about the system of appropriate responses and then apply that knowledge to the system. Someone who understands more clearly how a system works, having interacted with many different kinds of systems, can more quickly adapt to those systems. One has only to look at my resume to understand that this kind of metacognition works in gamers. I mean, who else can boast that they were debate team captain, a lobbyist, manager of a retail store, and leader of combat troops in two warzones as well as a graduate student? My ability to adapt to changing circumstances may be directly attributed to a wide variety of game experiences, from first person shooters to strategy simulators to Tetris. Ah, validation!

Advertising, advertising, advertising

In talking about advertising and advergames, a couple of issues and connections seem to spring forward into prominence. Advertising, product placement, broadcast underwriting... these all play a role in today's society. Coming from a political science and pseudo-PR background, it's pretty simple to pick out certain key objects and ad buy-ins that pervade entertainment media today.

Bogost appears to have engaged in an interesting historical retrospective in these chapters, outlining major steps in advertisment games and product placement in games. It would appear that his approach in doing this is to demonstrate that persuasion in games is not limited to the procedures in place, but also by the inclusion or exclusion of certain advertisment aspects. To say that product placement in games is ubiquitous is no mere understatement- one has only to fire up any of the NCAA Football or Madden games on X-Box 360 to be bombarded by any number of major sponsors. If these games feel like watching a football game, it may be because the UnderArmour, Coke, and Gatorade logos are as prevalent as hulking linebackers. These placement attempts may degrade the gaming experience, but once the player realizes that without external assistance from these sponsoring companies the gameplay itself would suffer, it becomes a little easier to understand and handle.

The examples of product placement I find most interesting are the consistent placement of products that simply do not exist. One can enjoy seeing Red Apple cigarettes in Tarentino films, for example, even though this brand of cigarettes doesn't exist. They provide a kind of associative advertising experience, if a negative one as seen in Pulp Fiction. In Mass Effect, weapons manufacturors brand and offer their wares for specific play types. The Halcyon assault rifle is designed for those who want a high rate of fire but reduced accuracy, while the Rapier rifle may provide greater accuracy and hitting power at a reduced rate of fire. Similarly, in Wing Commander III, modern day aircraft manufacturors are billed as the designers for the futuristic exo-atmospheric fighters used to win the war. An argument may be made for the continued success of McDonald-Douglass and Lockheed based on these futuristic visions of their product lines. By associating these companies with successful actions of future (if fictional) engagements, there may be a drive by investors to ensure that these companies continue to succeed.

I would argue that any time a modern weapon system is used in a game, that is an associative, rather than demonstrative, product placement type of advertisement. The weapons demonstrations are not 100% accurate, but the feeling one derives from effectively killing an opponent with a Colt Arms M16 or M4 is definitely a positive ad in favor of the system.

Digital Democracy

Gaming that which shouldn't be gamed has always been an interesting concept for me and my friends. We're wargamers, so we tend to focus on cataclysmic events in human history as examples of man's best traits, as well as man's worst failings. As I read about the kinds of historiographical games and how they each portray different, often highly controversial, views of the progression of human events, it became clear that the procedures in place in these games, such as 9/11 Survivor, Kuma/War, or Waco Revisited are designed to do exactly what I and my friends want to do: make people think about the most unthinkable moments in human history, and then force them to make choices about how they would address those circumstances.

For example, in JFK Reloaded, the player is forced to consider many different approaches to shooting President Kennedy. The physics engine allows for inertia, so shooting the driver is a valid option. Shooting the President directly is also an option, but it is very difficult to reproduce the Warren Commission's three shots as exactly as Oswald was supposed to have done.

In my friends' game design, players are given a set of models and rules to apply to any given situation. Our first example, which we hope to playtest in the next few months, is the Flight 93 scenario. By providing our players with models of the passengers and terrorists, as well as procedures for accounting for passenger fear and terrorist aggression, we hope to demonstrate the kinds of emotions and combat conditions both the terrorists and the passengers faced in their respective roles. As gamers, this appeals to our senses of historical accuracy as well as a kind of voyeurism. We will never know what went through the minds of those passengers and terrorists, but we can approximate it. These procedural choices will hopefully allow players to gain some insight into those high-tension conditions.

The Dean for Iowa Game serves as an example of procedures serving a different purpose. By focusing on the actions of a campaign worker, which is a very difficult task under the best circumstances, the game demonstrates the kinds of outreach activities available to the modern political organizer. I don't think that it's necessarily a bad game, but I do think, as Trundle writes, that the game should have focused more on Dean's positions rather than the difficulty of handing out pamphlets. This game is an example of concept defeating a good game design. This contrasts the games produced by the RNC to support their candidates: While the game design and procedures may seem simple, they at least include information about their campaign's political ideals and approaches.

Responses to Jenkins and spaces in a game

It seems as though we've reached a point in our development through this class where theories of design are gaining more prominence. As such, it makes sense to examine various theories for the design of our projects in the course, and to apply our experiences in games to these design theories (or vice versa...). This is an exciting time, I think.

Incidentally, I spent a great deal of my focus this week thinking about spatial orientation of game elements, and so found the Jenkins article to be the most compelling of our readings for this week. Jenkins' position is that while games may not successfully use classical narrative components as well as films or novels might, and since games are interactive more than they simply story-driven, the game environment plays a greater role in developing the story and the game experience. He makes a strong argument against the Ludologist position that game mechanics are the main theoretical component of games, or that straight narrative analysis needs to be the main focus as the Narratologists would have us believe. Jenkins draws connections between games and science fiction, another form of media which seems to attract negative criticism for failing to adhere to more classical narrative theories. In the case of science fiction, the setting holds sway over the characters' development or the plot progression. In Heinlein's works, for example, much of the page space is taken up describing political climate and social interaction within a futuristic society. His characters, for the most part, are generally flat guides for the environment. However, this does not mean that Starship Troopers isn't an engaging book; this simply means that the focus of this book isn't John Rico's development as a leader so much as it is his trip through the Federation and the Arachnid War. Rico becomes a leader in the Mobile Infantry because his job in the book is to explain how things are in Heinlein's future imperfect. High school, basic training, the battlefields of Clandathu, officer training, service aboard the Rodger Young... all of these settings are the meat the reader experiences through Rico's eyes.

In much the same way we engage in spatial interaction with video game worlds, such as Azeroth or Mars, in the shoes of our mostly mute avatars. In Half-Life, for example, the player engages in conflict as a means of exploring the world and solving a problem or set of problems. He acts upon the environment as a means of solving the embedded narrative, which unfolds as he explores the world, shoots aliens, and tries to figure out what in the hell happened. In this way Bartles' player types can be seen as all attended to through the development of the game's story-world.

What does that have to do with our thing? It is the task of the Woolf World team to develop a virtual representation of modernist London to the exacting specifications of Woolf scholars, who will, I'm certain, be looking for any reason to pan our work. In order to build a successful learning experience for the visitors to our project, we will need to borrow heavily from the spatial eccentricities Jenkins advocates for his game experiences, as well as the kinds of spatial divides Aarseth describes as existing in WoW. We can't build England, but we can build the neighborhoods we want to describe, and we can build an interesting and engaging virtual spatial experience.

...I think we can, anyway. I keep thinking of rivers and mountains. I think that will figure prominently. Needless to say, I'll be focusing primarily on the "game world" and narrative progression of the design document. After all, isn't that what games are all about?

Freyaday in repose

Allow me to introduce Freyaday. Her name comes from a modification of the name Friday, a female courier in the Heinlein book of the same name. Here, we can see that she has just completed a quest and is standing before some huge crystalized tree thing.