Reading Response #3 – On Gaming Science, Philosophy, Economics and Politics

The readings I did for this week’s reading response were a fascinating, all-comprehensive survey of the nature of gaming and the gaming industry. Clive Thompson’s “Science of Play” presents an inside look at how games are created through a look at how Halo 3 was play-tested, and how that influenced the design process. McKenzie Wark’s “Gamer Theory 2.0” presents an interpretation of the deeper themes and concepts that are covered by various games, such as Katamari Damacy and Deus Ex. Also, we get an idea of the nature of business and economics within “synthetic worlds” – games (mostly multiplayer online games, or MMORPGs) whose spaces of play, whose worlds are always active & persistently in action. It turns out that these worlds have more than play action and fighting going on within them. They also have social politics between the people who interact with each other with in them, and even economics, as the currencies within these worlds can actually trade against other currencies in real life! Through these three readings, I can see that gaming has become more than a staple of impetuous youth, but rather, it is now its own cultural phenomenon worthy of academic study, complete with its own politics, business and philosophy. Gaming is transcendent even in many other ways. It is art & design, it is emotion & passion, it is story & literary, introspective & exhilarating, political & personal – it is an alternate universe that can yield a whole lot of promise for our brave new world, as the new media that it is.

Games are, first and foremost, art and design. Clive Thompson’s article “The Science of Play,” deals with the amount of effort it takes just to create the virtual worlds that have such intriguing dynamics after they are created. It deals with the amount of effort it takes to work on the design & architecture of the worlds – the very foundation of everything else in our world and the gaming world, and the amount of effort it takes to complete tests that make sure the worlds work properly. To be more specific, the game covers the extensive amount of effort that Bungie, the company that created Halo 3 and the rest of the Halo series, put into testing the game so that they could make sure that everything ran smoothly and nothing was wrong. To do this, according to the article, Bungie took advantage of the highly advanced testing facility that Microsoft (theirs, and the Xbox’s parent company) gave to them in order to undertake more than 3000 hours of game play testing conducted by some 600 everyday gamers in order to analyze every last detail, from favored weapons to how often and where, down to the square foot, players would get killed. The article dubs Halo as the “Star Wars of the thumb stick generation,” and so in order for Bungie to live up to this reputation, they are determined to make Halo 3 perfect. In order to achieve this goal, Bungie hired an experimental psychologist from the University of Cincinatti in order to help do all the game testing. In order to take care of details in the game, from things fluctuating from being insanely easy to downright impossible, the psychologist’s team quickly moved towards building tools for extracting game play data, and when players interacted with elements of the game, in order to complete weekly tests and find the snags that needed to be found in order to make the game perfect – a mutant alien that was far too powerful, a lava pit that too many people would fall into, etc. These steps all culminated in a vote made by the players on a 1-to-5 scale that would rate how fun the levels were. The psychologist’s team pushed for all 5s. Ultimately, this is the amount of effort it takes in order to get a game perfect.

Next, after the game is created, one must see how the players interact with each other in-game, and how and whether this may form the rudiments of society. This is where Edward Castronova’s Synthetic Worlds comes into play. Castronova’s book details MMORPGs (which he calls “mor-pegs”), in order to see how, when the game becomes more than a game, but an entire world unto itself that is always active, and never settling – what happens? We see that there are four types of players who decide to traverse the world – Adventurers ( people in the game looking for a challenge), Explorers ( people who wish to see new worlds and what they are like), Socializers ( people who join the world to make new friends), and Controllers ( people who join the world simply to domineer over others). We also see currencies that, thanks to the fact that people decide to sell in-world items online and make money through the time and effort they decide to put into the world, trade in real life, and thus bring validity to the synthetic world as a reification of our economy. And we also see people who exert their influence in places like Second Life in order to show off “synthetic” social status in order to gain prestige amongst others in the “synthetic world.” Indeed, after the tireless work of game design is done, the game’s intricacies only grow as the people who play the game themselves bring such thorough and complicated personalities and politics to the game to add another layer to play within the synthetic world.

Finally, McKenzie Wark’s “Gamer Theory, 2.0” brings the next level of civilization development to the world of gaming – theory and philosophy. For this, I chose 2 chapters whose philosophy I shall highlight – “COMPLEX” on the game Deus Ex, and “ANALOG” on the game “Katamari Damacy.” “Katamari Damacy’s” chapter talks of the game as being an analog because it seems to represent a process analogous to the trials of Sisyphus, who was forced to roll a ball up a hill for all eternity. In this way, the game seems to represent an artistic analogue, according to the book’s chapter, on the creation of the universe through the stars, and the excruciating effort that that had to take…. Deus Ex’s chapter, on the other hand, is called “COMPLEX” because it details the detailed topography and topology of the complicated relationships in the game between the four factions that are sometimes at odds with each other, sometimes not, such as those who are for merging (Omar), versus those who are not for merging (Apostlecorp), those who are for separation (Templar) versus those who are not for separation (Illuminati). By analyzing games in this way, Wark seems to have brought a final layer of high culture to the world of gaming – first there was the creation of art, then the art was given life, an economy and society in “Synthetic Worlds,” and now finally, with the philosophical musings of “Gamer Theory 2.0,” we have high culture imbued into the world of game, synthetic worlds and all.

As one can see from these three readings, gaming shows all the details of reality and culture of our world, reified in a new domain – cyberspace. Whether this represents the future, who knows?