Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Online Games and Virtual Worlds
Networked Play and Virtual Communities
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- The MMOG Boom
- Communities of Research: Traditions in Play, Game and Internet Studies
Networked Play and Virtual CommunitiesFrom the moment that networks began to appear in labs on college campuses, people tried to play on them. Today’s massively multiplayer online games descend from the same college-hacker tradition that spawned Spacewar. While a complete history of MMOGs and MMOWs is beyond the scope of this book, understanding something about their origins will help to unpack the complex relationship between design and player: In what contexts are these games created, and by whom? What are their underlying values and cultures? What types of players do designers anticipate will play these games? And what sorts of emergent behaviors are these players likely to exhibit when theire play styles come into contact with the affordances of the game software? The fantasy role-playing genre is by far the most well-known (although not necessarily the most popular) of contemporary MMOG genres, epitomized by the ten-million subscriber strong World of Warcraft (REF). The majority of games in this genre—which tend to place a heavy emphasis on combat, leveling and statistics-based character construction—have their roots in early text-based MUDs (multi-user dungeons or domains), which in turn derive their underlying mechanics from tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) (REF). D&D in turn arose out of a long-standing tradition of tabletop strategy games, which can be traced even further back to the Nineteenth Century practice of army miniatures (REF: Wells). This lineage has deep implications on the design of contemporary MMOGs and the specific audiences they attract. These games have their roots in a fantasy militaristic gameplay that is almost exclusively male, although the roleplaying genre expanded this audience to some extent. The tabletop gaming tradition revolves around elaborate rules that involve dice with as many as twenty sides. In the case of role-playing games like D&D, player characters and their actions are proceduralized through a blend of statistics and die rolls that typically determine the outcome of scenarios. These can vary from combat, to spell-casting, to tasks such as picking a lock or obtaining information. These characters are then embellished through creative practices by players, not only during the role-playing experience itself, but also in the form of fan art, such as drawings or three-dimensional figures that express players’ individual characters. Tabletop role-playing games such as Dungons & Dragons, which built their narratives around high fantasy literature, including JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Ring, Robert E. Howard’s Conan Chronicles and others, were extremely popular on college campuses during the 1970s and 1980s. This was also, coincidentally, the period and context in which computer networks were beginning to appear throughout the U.S. and Europe. That these two emerging trends would converge in the minds of (mostly male) computer science students seems almost inevitable, and the result was the text-based MUD, a networked, computationally enabled adaptation of the core mechanics of D&D-style games. More followed and soon the conventions of the genre, still confined to the ivory towers of college computer labs, became codified. The MMOG Boom MUDs sustained a small cult following for a decade and a half, until the mid-1990s when they were joined by a new generation games that integrated graphics to the other conventions of the genre, and were targeted to a mass audience. Since then, MMOGs have emerged as the fastest growing sector of the video game industry, with exponential growth from one mega-hit to the next. Each new generation of MMOG brings new refinements that include interface improvements, more sophisticated graphics, and increasingly vast worlds. Yet despite an explosion in both the quantity and quality of these offerings, their range remains surprisingly narrow and continues to be deeply tied to their MUD origins. Games like Merdian 59 (the first graphical game in this genre), Ultima Online, EverQuest, Dark Ages of Camelot, Asheron’s Call, the Korean mega-hits Lineage, Ragnarok and Maple Story, the American blockbuster World of Warcraft, and more recently, The Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online, embody this role-playing, D&D-derived, Tolkienesque fantasy genre. These are joined by science-fiction themed variants such as Star Wars Galaxies, Planetside, and Anarchy Online, and others with themes such as pirates, superhero and horror, most of which build on similar conventions, and focus thematically on combat and power fantasies. World of Warcraft (WoW) is often mistakenly cited as the largest MMOG in the world. This position is currently held by the Korean fantasy-themed side-scroller Maple Story. Using similar level-based mechanics, but simpler graphics, Maple Story had over 72 million mostly ‘tween “subscribers” (in contrast with WoW’s mere 10 million) by 2008, and boasted the second best-selling content card in Target stores, after iTunes (REF). But these figures are eclipsed by a social MMOW that has drawn nearly 90 million subscriptions as of this writing. If you guessed, I was referring to Second Life, you were wrong. America’s best-publicized MMOW only had a little over 13 million “residents” as of this writing. The MMOW poised to reach a population of 100 million “residents” is actually the ‘tween targeted Finish social world Habbo Hotel (REF). Other social environments for kids include MyCoke and Gaia Online, and virtual worlds are now popping up targeted at an even younger audience, such as Webkinz and Club Penguin. There is a reason why terms like “citizens” and “residents” are in quotes here. These numbers can be somewhat misleading, since virtually all MMOG and MMOW publishers count demographics by the number of “residents,” “citizens,” avatars, or subscriptions, which does not necessarily correlate to the actual number of unique players, nor even to the number of active subscribers. Especially in worlds with free subscriptions, many players seldom if ever log on, while the most regular players often have multiple accounts. There is also the phenomenon of churn: denizens of virtual might leave after a given time, and in worlds with free-subscriptions, they never really un-subscribe, even if they are effectively no longer active members. MMOWs have progressed, perhaps a bit more quietly, alongside MMOGs, and, as these figures suggest, have arguably begun to surpass their gaming cousins. They also got an earlier start. Graphical social worlds, starting with Lucasfilms Habitat in 1986, predated graphical MMOGs by almost a decade. Admittedly more low-tech, the earlier worlds were 2D and had limited affordances for player creativity. LambdaMOO, a text-based environment created in 1991 as an experiment at Xerox PARC (the birthplace of the graphical user interface) in 1991, introduced the notion of a user-created world that players could extend and expand in seemingly unlimited directions using only words on a screen (REF). LambdaMOO, which is still in operation, is the most-studied text-based world and as a result, has become bellwether for emergent behavior, such as the creation of laws, and attempts at building an economic system (REF). The mid-nineties saw a boom in virtual worlds, inspired by Neal Stephenson’s 1992 cyberpunk classic Snow Crash, which paralleled early MMOG development. In the age of what then-Federal Bank Chairman Alan Greenspan described as “irrational exuberance,” literally dozens of companies were formed to either create or service the virtual worlds industry, most of them within a few miles of where Second Life’s Linden Lab stands today. Active Worlds, the graphical ancestor to LambdaMOO, launched in 1995 and remains the longest continuously running entirely user-created virtual world. It was followed by OnLive in 1996, which is now available as DigitalSpace Traveler. Other virtual worlds of this period include Cybertown and Blaxxun. (For a guided tour of virtual worlds, see Bruce Damers’s Avatars! Exploring and Building Virtual Worlds on the Internet, Peachpit, 1997.) A decade later, MMOGs and MMOWs are experiencing another period of phenomenal growth. This has been fueled in part by significant advances in on-board graphics technologies for personal computers, and the widespread adoption of broadband, two prerequisites that impeded markets for early virtual worlds. Beside blockbuster titles, smaller independent MMOGs and MMOWs that defy the traditional conventions are experiencing a strong showing. Puzzle Pirates, an independent casual MMOG, has added four million registered users since 2003. (REF) New Medeon’s Whyville, a science learning MMOG for ’tweens, had 3.4 million subscribers at the time of this writing, 60% of whom are female (REF). Even EVE Online, a popular science fiction world with a sophisticated economy and political system based in Iceland, has not only survived but grown with as little as 250,000 players. The MMOW space continues to expand with new offerings popping up on a regular basis. There.com, which was Second Life’s original competitor, has managed to survive and reinvent itself several times since it first opened in 2003. The imminent release of Sony’s Home, an online community for the Playstion 3 modeled after Second Life, suggests that virtual worlds are (finally!) here to stay. With all the real and imagined success of MMOGs and MMOWs, there is another more somber side to the equation: What happens when virtual worlds fail? When new games are released, online games have been known lose audiences to a mass-exodus, and the closure of MMOGs and MMOWs is a common occurrence. The very first fantasy-themed graphical MMOG, Meridian 59, originally published by 3DO in 1996 and closed soon afterwards, famously reinvented itself as a self-sustaining indie enterprise in 2002. Another well-known closure is Microsoft’s Asheron’s Call. We know as little about why games fail as we do about why they succeed. Why is World of Warcraft a smash hit, but Star Wars Galaxies, built on a perennial, mainstream franchise, a weak cult favorite at best? Even MMOGs backed by big media behemoths, such as Electronic Arts’ The Sims Online, and Disney’s Virtual Magic Kingdom Online, were joining the death march to the MMOG graveyard at this writing. Among the apparent MMOG failures is Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, the subject of this study. Based on and set in the world of the popular single-player Myst series, Uru departed from many of the traditional conventions of MMOGs by transporting its complex puzzles and unique style of spatial storytelling into a cooperative, multiplayer game. Uru has no fighting, no killing, no levels, and no point system. Players work together to solve interconnected, brain-twisting puzzles, many of which require a familiarity with the elaborate cosmology, characters and storyline of the Myst series. This includes not only knowledge of the world’s mythos and back story, but also facility with its arcane technologies, many of which are instrumental in the puzzle-solving mechanics. As with the Sims Online, it would seem that an MMOG based on a top-selling single-player franchise should have been a shoo-in. But in spite of its ardent fan base, two successive attempts at launching the game failed to draw the requisite revenue to ensure its ongoing operation. What Uru did succeed in doing, however, was to give rise to a small, devoted, resourceful and tenacious play community with a distinctively different play style than some of the more traditional MMOG genres described earlier. Although the Uru community is dwarfed in scale by virtually all of the MMOGs mentioned above, it has been described by one of my colleagues as “perfect storm” for MMOG research. The expulsion and mass exodus of Uruvians from their “game of origin” at the precise moment when the second wave of virtual worlds were coming online created a powerful confluence of culture, technology, timing and opportunity. Because Uru and Myst players are particularly tenacious and industrious, perhaps in part due to their decade-long encounter with the so-called “mensa-level” puzzles of Myst games, they were poised to display a unique form of emergent behavior. As we will learn, they migrated into other virtual worlds, created their own Uru-based culture artifacts, and even entire recreations of the Uru game; they created Uru “mods” in other game engines, including original levels for the game; and they even developed a network of player-run Uru serves to enable players to run the game during the hiatus between its two commercial iterations. This emergent culture that traversed both games and virtual worlds provides us with rich insight into the many facets of the interplay between networked play communities and the virtual worlds they inhabit. Communities of Research: Traditions in Play, Game and Internet Studies Game studies is a relatively new set of academic disciplines devoted various aspects of digital games. The wide array of research foci, disciplines and methodologies that fall under the umbrella of game studies illustrates the vastness and diversity of the field. Games have been held up in academic institutions as a model for both interdisciplinary research and education, with many cross-disciplinary programs bridging disparate fields such as theater and computer science, art and engineering, informatics and humanities. Research agendas embrace everything from cultural studies, humanities and communications, to sociology and anthropology, to computer science and engineering. Academia has also become a breeding ground for new game genres, hybrid practices, and a number of alternative formats, including as serious, activist, documentary, and art games, as well as mobile, augmented reality and alternate reality genres and machinima, are being incubated at universities. Just as play communities are not a new phenomenon, neither is the study of play and games. Most digital game scholars are aware of the work of Huizinga, Caillois and Sutton-Smith, twentieth century play scholars whose work pre-dates computer games, but they may not be as familiar with the larger body of research in this area. While digital game studies has traditionally placed a heavy focus on the game as artifact, scholars of analog play have tended to focus more on the player from an anthropological or developmental perspective. Many were interested in the implications of play and games as a defining characteristic of human culture. Johan Huizinga’s 1948 Dutch classic Homo Ludens (Huizinga 1950) is considered a canonical text for computer game designers and researchers. Sub-titled, “the play element in culture,” his treatise is an exhaustive historical analysis of the many facets of play in human society. Its follow-up, Man, Play and Games, by Roger Caillois, a scholar of literary theory and sociology, builds on Huizinga to develop a more cohesive theory of play and play genres. (Caillois 1961) Both of these volumes have become deservedly influential in the field, although game studies has inherited some of their flaws as well as their strengths. Both books suffer from a predictable (perhaps historically inevitable) disregard for female play styles and culture, a point that is made transparent by their titles. Huizinga’s study of examines every conceivable aspect of male culture through a “ludic” (play-oriented) lens, specifically focusing on agonistic play and citing concepts such as “virility,” “frenzied megolamania,” and “competition for superiority” (REF; page #), yet makes only passing reference to girls’ play activities. (REF: Huizinga 1950 p#) Caillois repeatedly asserts, somewhat dismissively, that girls’ play is, of course, entirely devoted to rehearsal for motherhood. (Caillois 1961) REF: page # The androcentric orientation of these writings is exacerbated by problematics around gender that pervade in the game industry itself, which have been explored in a number of texts. (REF: Ludica, Flangan Playculture, From Barbie To Mortal Kombat, Beyond Barbie, etc.)) In spite of his dismissive stance towards girl’s play, Caillois does make one vital contribution to bringing more gender-balance to the dialog by introducing the paidia concept. He sees play falling along a spectrum, at one end of which are goal-focused, rule-based games, ludus, and at the other end of which are open-ended, creative play activities, paidia. These texts are not isolated phenomena. Brian Sutton-Smith, also highly regarded among digital game scholars, has written on games and play since the 1970s and held a leaderhip role as part a movement that began in the 1970s to study play as socio-cultural practice. He was a co-founder of the Association for the Study of Play (TASP) which brought together noted scholars in extended discussion about the cultural practices and ramifications of play. One of these was Gregory Bateson, husband of Margaret Mead, who observed in his “Theory of Play and Fantasy” the astonishing ability of both animals and humans to distinguish between real and play fighting (REF: Bateson 1972). Anthropologists Robert Schechner and Victor Turner both conducted detailed studies of ritual and performance, and also experimented collectively with performative interpretations of ethnographic data (REFS Turner, Schechner). Other work of this period included Iona and Peter Opie’s comprehensive ethnographic investigation of the variants of popular street and playground games throughout Britain provide only one of one of many examples of sociological research of this period. (Opie and Opie 1969) Play has also been of keen interest to developmental psychologists and educational researchers, including Jean Piaget, Donald Winnicott and Maria Montessori (REF). Montessori developed an entire educational system and a series of “didactic materials”—sensory learning objects that taught through use—based on the observation that children learn while playing through a process of experimentation and discovery. (REF: Montessori) Academic scholars of analog play are also joined by independent game writers who can be characterized as “game philosophers.” Bernard Suites’ The Grasshopper: Games Life and Utopia is considered something of a classic in this genre (Suits 1978), as is Bernard DeKoven’s The Well-Played Game (DeKoven 1978). Other philosophical studies of games include the writings the “New Games” movement of the 1970s, whose ranks include DeKoven, Pat Farrington, George Leonard, Stewart Brand, and Andrew Fluegelman (Brand 1972) (Fluegelman 1976) (Fron, Fullerton, and Morie 2005). This movement also has ties to other activist community practices, including Internet innovations. Brand was founder of Whole Earth Catalog and, later, the WELL, one of the oldest continuously running online communities in the United States. Andrew Fluegelman is credited as the inventor the shareware business model for software marketing. The title of this book, communities of play, references the term “communities of practice,” originated in anthropology and widely adopted in Internet studies and computer-mediated communication. A community of practice is a group of individuals who engage in a process of collective learning and maintain a common identity defined by a shared domain of interest or activity (Lave and Wenger 1991). In this sense, play communities could be as a subset of communities of practice; however, for reasons that remain unclear, the study of online play has lagged behind other related disciplines that address networked social practices. This is not to say there has not been interest in play within the Internet studies community. As early as 1995, the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication published a special issue on “Play and Performance,” and in 1998, the journal Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) published a special issue devoted to play. (Dourish 1998) Other than these occasional nods, the coverage of networked play environments has been sparse. Even so, some of the pioneering scholars of MMOG research have come out of Internet studies (REF: Taylor, Klastrup, others?), and there has been a growing interest in online games and virtual worlds among CSCW scholars in recent years. (Nardi and Harris 2006) Download 0.83 Mb. Share with your friends:
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