Videogame walkthroughs provide instructions on various elements of gameplay in relation to specific digital games, and exist as text-based documents and, to a lesser extent, as recorded moving image game footage. We focus here on written-walkthroughs for the purposes of depth, while recognising the specific and significant position that moving image walkthroughs hold (see Ashton, forthcoming). Player-produced walkthroughs, freely and widely distributed online, point to the broader social contexts that inform and structure player agency. In this article, we emphasize three perspectives on these documents. First, walkthroughs can be approached as a means of recording and codifying playing styles, thereby legitimising specific approaches or strategies. Accordingly, we highlight glitch hunting and the Pokémon series to illustrate the diversity of these playing styles and the significance of the walkthrough as a form of ludic archival document. Second, walkthroughs as textual codifications of gameplay potential can encourage new styles of engagement with authors and performers by outlining opportunities for play, and illuminating strategies and techniques previously unknown to the reader. Importantly, as we shall demonstrate, walkthroughs not only investigate and interrogate game texts – exploring their every narrative turn and spatial aspects in minute detail – but also frequently present techniques that take advantage of weaknesses and flaws in the ruleset or code of the game in order to offer new gameplay options. In this respect, as James Newman (2008) suggests, walkthroughs can be understood as a form of reverse-engineering that renegotiates the player-designer relationship and encourages (perhaps even demands) deliberately investigative, resistant and deviant strategies of gameplay. These modes of engagement frequently involve playing beyond performative norms and technical limits. The walkthrough, then, is both a document of the game as designed and a record of investigations into the vagaries and imperfections of its implementation and how these may be enacted and exploited. Third, we suggest that the prefigurative potential of walkthroughs may be seen as having a regulatory quality and, therefore, represents a key mechanism for shaping the way videogames are played. Noting research on the social contexts of gameplay, we situate the prefigurative qualities of walkthroughs in the context of the presentation and performance of expertise.

Focusing on these three ways of approaching walkthroughs, we map the specific contexts for the ordering, dissemination and reception of walkthroughs, and highlight the forms of governance and control that mark player relations in these settings. Key to an appreciation of the importance and uses of walkthroughs is recognition of the role played by the online and offline videogaming communities that support and surround them. Accordingly, we are keen to examine the connections between the expert walkthrough creator and the game community contexts within which this expertise is developed and asserted. In establishing the significance of these contexts and forms of identity work, the following sections first introduce and position walkthroughs, and then move on to examine the recording of playing styles, the presentation of new gameplay opportunities, and the regulation and policing of technique.

Defining and Positioning Walkthroughs

Thornham’s (2008) encouragement to shift the focus of games studies toward an investigation of  the mediation of games by gamers provides a useful starting point for thinking about walkthroughs. Indeed, as Newman (2008: 93) describes, walkthroughs are ‘rich and multifaceted texts [that] perform a variety of interrelated functions’. Accordingly, we encourage a consideration of walkthroughs as extended instruction manuals, virtual tour guides, and explorations of the boundaries of the logic and integrity of the game code and simulation models. Given the plasticity and mutability of walkthroughs, their variety of functions, and the range of uses to which they may be put, it is useful to spend a little time considering their scope and setting them in their context alongside the myriad other fan-produced texts and the products of the mainstream games industries which serve overlapping but nonetheless different purposes.

Scholarly studies of walkthroughs are a comparative rarity as a topic in academic game studies (e.g. Burn 2006) and where they are encountered, their range is not always made evident. Mia Consalvo’s (2003: 327-328) study of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time walkthroughs describes the texts as:

Detailed guides to how a player should play a game sequence to find all of the hidden bonuses and surprises, how to avoid certain death, and how to advance past difficult puzzles or trouble spots to best play and win the game.

Here, we note a broad and inclusive definition but one that is clearly centred on the play imperative. For Consalvo, the walkthrough is essentially a guide, a tutorial whose principal, perhaps only, function is to drive the player onward towards completion. The implication of Consalvo’s characterisation is that the walkthrough is turned to in times of difficulty and represents a virtual safety net. Both Consalvo (2007) and Newman (2008) have subsequently gone on to explore the ways in which walkthrough use might be considered ‘cheating’ within specific gaming cultures and contexts. While the discussion of cheating is somewhat beyond our scope here, it is important to note that were our definition of walkthroughs solely limited to matters of completion and the conquering of difficult puzzles or trouble spots then it should come as no surprise to find that walkthroughs might be treated as little more than cheat sheets for the non-expert player. [1]

Without doubt, walkthroughs can more than adequately serve the function of purveyors of hints and tips to assist gamers during times of difficulty. Indeed, the video walkthrough site StuckGamer.com alludes to this imperative in its very title. However, any investigation of the scope and extent of the kinds of text-based walkthroughs that are collected at hubs such as GameFAQs.com, which are the focus of our study, reveals a considerably wider array of potential functions. Such archives speak of a more diverse range of motivations among authors and readers alike.

Our investigation focuses on a range of player-produced walkthroughs available via the GameFAQs.com online portal. Our decision to focus on player-produced walkthroughs reflects our interest in the status of these texts not simply as presentations of solutions for gamers unable to progress beyond a particular point, but as foci for discussion and experimentation with games and gameplay. As such, we have chosen not to consider commercially-produced Official Strategy Guides, often published in close consultation with game development teams and publishers, as these tend to legitimise a limited range of ways to tackle the game; demonstrating only ‘approved’ tactics, strategies and approaches to gameplay. The player-produced walkthroughs, FAQs and guides we consider here, on the other hand, are more concerned with documenting games and gameplay opportunity in completist and exploratory terms. As such, discussions about mechanisms for exploiting inconsistencies or glitches in games fall within the remit of the fan-author who is liberated from the demand to deal only with ‘officially-sanctioned’ gameplay and technique.

For similar reasons, we have chosen also not to explore the small number of video walkthroughs such as those available at StuckGamer.com. Like the commercial Strategy Guide, StuckGamer’s downloadable clips appear to function more as didactic tutorials than GameFAQs’ altogether more investigative explorations. Moreover, we feel that there is something important in the textual (im)materiality of the GameFAQs walkthrough. Their existence as constantly evolving, collaboratively authored and updated, searchable, plaintext files is vital to their function. In stripping away the audio-visual representation and the tactility of gameplay ‘feel’, the GameFAQs walkthrough reduces the videogame to its most fundamental constituents and casts both the reader and author as game studies analyst examining underlying simulation models and systems.

Importantly, our aim here is not to present a survey that accounts for a wide variety of subtle variations in form and format of the myriad walkthroughs available on GameFAQs or via other portals and fansites. Rather, we wish to examine specific walkthrough texts in order to exemplify some the overarching characteristics of the form and to point to the distinctiveness of the text-based walkthrough in relation to the didacticism and completion-focus of the official Strategy Guide or video walkthrough.

While GameFAQs.com is perhaps the largest repository of player-produced walkthroughs currently available online, its title is something of a misnomer as much of the textual material it hosts far outstrips the typical designation of ‘FAQ’ both within and outside gaming culture. The FAQ (or Frequently Asked Questions) has become commonplace within technical and support literature and is primarily designed to anticipate user difficulties and issues with a product or service. The FAQ is typically structured as a list of apparently oft-posed questions that are supplied with answers, solutions or suggestions for action and, as such, are designed to structure self-guided help or initial troubleshooting. Among videogaming communities, the FAQ has been adopted as a similarly problem-centric document. FAQs are most typically written to deal with specific issues and potential problems that gamers are likely to encounter whether these be specific puzzles, techniques or the vagaries of control systems. Authored by players, these texts bear some similarities with walkthroughs in that they ostensibly aim to provide support and guidance for gamers and speak of a desire to pass on knowledge and share the benefits of experience. In turn, they serve simultaneously to stand as indicators of both the author’s expertise and the reader’s implied poverty of skill and dependence on the ability and generosity of others. Perhaps the most significant differentiator between the walkthrough and the FAQ, however, is that the latter isolates specific moments of gameplay. The walkthrough, on the other hand, provides a far more discursive, in places step-by-step, account that details a journey through the gameworld and unveils the scope of its potentialities. In fact, recalling Consalvo’s definition above, we might find that her concentration on problem-solving and ‘completion’ actually makes for a better working definition for what we term here the FAQ than for the walkthrough.

It is useful also to distinguish the objects of our interest in this article from another text that is frequently described in the same terms as the player-produced walkthrough. The ‘Strategy Guide’ is most usually the product of commercial publishing and texts very often designate themselves as having ‘official’ status indicating that they were developed with collaboration from the game’s designers and development teams and with reference to design documentation. Prima Games (n.d.: online), which described itself as ‘the world’s leading publisher of strategy content for PC and console video games’, describes how ‘each guide is packed with the essential information you need to know to not just beat but dominate every game you play’. Similarly, the Prima Games (n.d.: online) description for its strategy videos encourages players to, ‘watch how an expert moves through a key boss battle and you’ll master a game in no time’. Their official status means that Strategy Guides often reproduce production and pre-production art both as part of the aesthetic package and as a means of illustrating and explaining the gameplay under discussion. Importantly, we should note how they are developed through consultation with design teams and development documentation and are devised as part of the retail strategy for the title. Indeed, at retail, they are frequently sold alongside the game reinforcing the value of the potential purchase (the scope, extent and literal ‘size’ of the game) while also indicating the complexity of the undertaking that implicitly requires that the player have some manner of guidance or external support.

The Strategy Guide may be seen as a mechanism by which the integrity of the game as code and as impenetrably faultless system to be played against is reinforced. In addition to presenting a potentially lucrative retail opportunity and serving to frame the game as rich, complex and potentially rewarding even prior to purchase, Official Strategy Guides draw on a close relationship between professional writers, development teams and publishers and most clearly point to the mediation of the game by developers and publishers. It follows, perhaps naturally, that the scope of the Official Game Guide is limited only to those aspects of the game anticipated by the designers and while there may be evidence of vogueishly “emergent” gameplay (Salen and Zimmerman, 2003), it will clearly emerge only within the confines established by the developers and within the restrictions imposed by their code and simulation model. As such, while Official Strategy Guides are focused more on the journey through the game than the anticipatory problem-based FAQ, any discussion of gameplay opportunities that take advantage of flaws in the game’s logic or that exploit repeatable bugs or glitches is notably absent.

This is by no means the only aspect by which we might distinguish the Official Strategy Guide from the player-produced walkthrough. They share some similarities with player-produced walkthroughs in being more journey-orientated than problem-based, and more discursive, open and exploratory than the anticipatory troubleshooting of the FAQ. More obviously, commercially available (Official) Strategy Guides legitimise certain “official” play strategies, and implicitly close down the possibility of other, often more resistant, exploratory and emergent types of play that exploit or workaround the “intended” limitations and structures of the game. It follows that they do not ‘replicate the deductive and experimental working patterns of gamers learning through experience and observation’ (Newman 2008: 97).

In our opening discussion we have sought to draw out some of the specificities of walkthroughs by positioning them in relation to FAQs and Official Strategy Guides. The focus in the remainder of the article is on the mediation of games by (groups of) players. Our investigation is based on how engagements with walkthroughs by players (either as authors or readers and users) are bounded by implicitly and explicitly enforced relations of control. This analysis is  structured following Newman’s (2008: 93) suggestion that, player-produced texts “record playing styles, encourage the adoption of news styles of engagement, and perhaps even seek to regulate the way videogames are played”.

Recording Playing Styles

A consideration of different playing styles and ‘unanticipated’ forms of emergent gameplay, concerned not only with playing the game but playing with it, are essential in appreciating the ways in which videogames are configured through the performances and practices of play (see Moulthrop, 2004). In their discussion of ‘digital play’, Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter (2003: 19) emphasize that ‘though gamers navigate through virtual environments, their actions consist of selections (rather than choices) made between alternatives that have been anticipated by game designers’. As a broad statement, this usefully points to the game as a carefully built virtual environment within which players operate with varying degrees of agency. Certainly, Kline et. al.’s position is extremely helpful in foregrounding the design process (the consideration of which is lamentably absent from much scholarship on games). However, their assertion that the available alternatives presented to the players are limited to those anticipated by game designers is uncomplicated and tends to present both a vision of software development that is overstated in allusions to precision and perfection and an understatement of the exploratory, investigative nature of gameplay.

While scrutiny of the Official Strategy Guide might well further solidify the notion of the game environment as locked down rulesets enshrined in code and pristine mathematical models and simulations, the player-produced walkthrough eloquently demonstrates the misplaced technical idealism of this position. As critics such as Laura Ermi and Frans Mäyrä (2005) and Newman (2008) have demonstrated, the videogame is brought to life through the interactions between player and system. As we shall see below, their agency allows players to interrogate the different available selections and to enact new and sometimes unanticipated forms of gameplay that may emerge from the exploitation of unintended situations and the consequences of certain inputs, or combinations of gameplay operations. It is our assertion here that a more careful and considered investigation of walkthroughs is vital for unveiling these configurative dimensions of play, since these player-produced texts are among the key sites through which gameplay is mediated, interrogated, reformed and reimagined by players.

Glitch Hunting: The Pokémon Series

The act of glitch hunting demonstrates the configurative nature of play and how the open, mutable nature of certain games allows players to redefine, remake or even reduce them into a set of resources for playing with. Newman (2008: 15) states:

Players explore and probe the boundaries of what the game will do to destruction, exposing and exploiting the glitches that slip through the quality control systems and that, in extremis, may crash the game outright. More interestingly, many of these glitches or limitations in the simulation, allow access to new, perhaps unpredictable, techniques and capabilities or to unravel the sequence of the game-making levels or abilities available out of order.

In the practices of glitch-hunters, we see players who clearly operate outside the ‘official strategies’ and who apparently eschew the player-game relationship model. They instead embark on a deliberate and rigorous journey with the goal to uncover and master not only what the game appears to offer in terms of gameplay and available selections, but also those potentialities that even the code’s creators and developers were unaware of. Importantly, many bugs, glitches and flaws within games have moved into the lexicon of gameplay as they become enshrined into walkthroughs as viable, if sometimes complicated and difficult to enact, techniques.

The Pokémon (Game Freak, 1999-) series has provided extremely rich pickings for those wanting to push their gameplay beyond the normally sanctioned boundaries. Glitches abound in various titles in the series with some simply crashing or freezing the game. It is also notable that even glitches such as these are studiously documented by walkthrough and FAQ authors who seek to create exhaustive coverage of every aspect of gameplay opportunity even those that potential bring gameplay to an abrupt end (sometimes even wiping extant progress in the bargain). There is clear currency in identifying these reproducible glitches even where they have no intrinsic gameplay value and actually set back or reset progress. The imperative here is clearly more complex than simple ‘completion’ of the game as many of the glitches that are turned up through the investigative glitch-hunting play have no benefit in this regard.

The recording and documentation of these glitches in walkthroughs and at fansites seems motivated more by a desire to create the most comprehensive account of the potentialities of the game rather than to simply guide players towards the performance of officially sanctioned strategies. As we have noted already, the notion of walkthrough completeness carries significant weight in communities such as those operating around GameFAQs.com. Even accepting that ‘completion’ is at best a nebulous term in relation to games given the variety of selections that may be made or performances that can be enacted, documenting the means by which the game may be ‘completed’ is but a small part of the task of the walkthrough author.

Not all glitches are show-stopping bugs that freeze gameplay. Many of the Pokémon exploits offer opportunities to break the logic and narrative sequence of the game, thereby obtaining items before they were designed to be available or unlocking sections without undertaking the requisite gameplay performances or making the otherwise putatively necessary selections. One of the most widely documented Pokémon glitches centres on obtaining the usually elusive ‘Mew’ character in the game. Ordinarily, the process is one demanding attendance at a Nintendo event at which Mew is ‘unlocked’ on the player’s cartridge. However, inventive players exploring the game’s system through iterative play, information gathering and analysis, found ways of unlocking this secret character by exploiting specific combinations and sequences of gameplay activity as outlined below.

To do the Mew glitch:

1. get 2 pokemons, water type***

2. have 13 items with you

3. get into battle

4. go to item

5. go to the 13th item (press down 12 times)

6. press select

7. press B

8. go to switch pokemon screen

9. press down (point to 2nd pokemon)

10. press A (the pokemon should turn to Mew)***

11. Now you can press B to cancel back to the battle screen and run away from battle OR kill the enemy to win the battle.

12. Heal your pokemon and put Mew into the PC then take it back out (it should fix the HP)###

13. Or simply trade it to another gameboy

*** using other types your pokemon will turn into a “fossil” and the game freeze at step 10

*** if you win the battle with this ‘Mew’, it will turn to lv.101

### it will mess up your item#1 so don’t put bicycle at the first place in the item list (put potion ^^) and also some other things may not work probably.

— repeat the steps 1-10 will turn your Mew back to the original pokemon (the pokemon you turned into Mew will come back) and it will also fix all the problems you get when you hold the Mew (fix the item#1). (gunbladelad77, 2009)

What is immediately clear is the amount of effort and work that goes into the unraveling of glitches such as these in a game’s code. In this case, players operate from a starting position where the outcome is uncertain rather than acting as true reverse-engineers. By playing with attentive rigor so that inputs and actions can be documented and repeated, the exploit is gradually revealed through iteration. Other (in)famous Pokémon glitches include the so-called ‘Glitch Pokémon’ MISSNGNO and ‘M, described by Newman (2008). Although there remains much speculation about the status of these Pokémon:

The brute fact is that both MISSINGNO and ‘M are the products of glitches. They manifest themselves as real Pokémon though in fact their names and graphical representations reveal their status as errors. MISSINGNO or ‘missing number’ refers to a data call in the program that searches for a non-existent Pokémon from the checklist while ‘M is represented on screen as a garbled mass of pixels, roughly in the shape of an inverted L and looking not dissimilar to a Tetris block. Neither glitch is serious in that they do not crash the game (though some reports do suggest conditions under which game data may become corrupted), but they are anomalies that arise from coding errors that arise under a specific set of repeatable conditions that are comprehensively documented in Game Guides such as Raddatz’s (2005) and even on Nintendo’s own corporate website (Newman 2008: 117).

What is of particular interest to us in this article are how glitches as products of aberrant, deviant, often deliberately re-configurative playings become canonised as part of the mediating mechanism of player regulation. Not only are Pokémon (and other game) glitches fastidiously recorded in various walkthroughs, but the existence of Glitch Pokémon such as MISSINGNO and ‘M are celebrated in fanart and fanfic thereby ensuring their mythic status among the community and absorbing them into the ‘official’ roster of collectible Pokémon (see Newman 2008 on the ‘Tales from the Glitch’ series of fanfics, for instance). There is a palpable sense in which the dramatais animalia of the Pokémon games are imbued with new agency as a result of the ‘Glitch Pokémon’ as fanfic writers, fanartists and players bring them to life.

Glitches and the Diversity of Playing Styles

In glitch-inspired fan creations, there is an implicit suggestion that even the developers of the game were unaware of the presence of these critters, especially since they are often uncovered only through the sensitive, investigative work of dedicated players who nurture them into revealing themselves. In the case of the Glitch Pokémon, their inclusion within the well-documented and widely-circulated fan canon of the game’s creature list has even necessitated that Nintendo recognise their existence by responding to the revelation of unanticipated play. Here, then, we see the inversion of Kline et al’s argument in which the developer is placed in the position of dealing with and responding to the consequences of unexpected and unplanned for performance and selections.

To a certain extent, we should be unsurprised by this apparent desire to investigate the game and probe its boundaries up to and even beyond the point of the apparent integrity of code and consistency of the gameworld. Videogames, after all, charge their players with tasks of investigation and exploration. Puzzle solving and the ascertaining of rules, strategies and techniques through the act of iterative play, reflection and replay, are the very watchwords of videogame engagement and gameplay. That this self-reflexive, configurative play should also seek to reconfigure the game into forms unimagined, unanticipated and unplanned by the developers is testimony partly to the difficulty of maintaining bug-free codebases but also, more interestingly, to the inventiveness of players and the plasticity of the gameworld as (re)configurable toolset for play. Furthermore, many videogames build into their ‘legitimate’ fabric the opportunity to enable additional, often initially hidden ‘debug’ or ‘cheat’ modes that, by offering level-skipping functions or even some form of primitive level creation tools, immediately and decisively reframe the relationship between player and game designer as Surman (2009) has so persuasively noted. That glitch-hunting and the exploitation of coding errors becomes part of the canonically accepted structural language of inputs, even if they are apparently unsupported as ‘official’ strategies, must surely be seen as nothing more than inevitable given the encouragement to step outside the role of player and into that of designer in titles like Sonic 2 (Sonic Team, 1992) or Little Big Planet (Media Molecule, 2008) or the frequency with which Easter Eggs and other secrets are embedded into games as barely hidden rewards.

Encouraging the Adoption of New Styles of Engagement

Recognising the ways in which videogames lay themselves open to diverse playings is an important and often overlooked notion in academic game studies. Walkthroughs are a key means by which players can develop and refine their gameplay styles and experiences. Some scholars and commentators have attempted to tackle this with rather crude classificatory systems that posit a few broader player types (e.g. Bartle, 1996). These are useful in drawing our attention to differences in the way the game may be configured and experienced by players. For instance, it should be clear that the quest for attaining high scores versus the completion of levels or sequences in speedy times dramatically alters the form and shape of the resultant gaming experience. Regardless of any questions we might have about the success of specific attempts to present taxonomies of play motivations or types, we are keen to note the pivotal role of walkthroughs in the processes they seek to describe.

As Consalvo (2007: 3) suggests, walkthroughs ‘challenge the notion that there is one ‘correct’ way to play a game’. More importantly, however, is that the formal recording of different playing styles provides a resource that other players might draw from in the development and honing of their own approach to the game. Crucial to this relationship is how walkthroughs are gathered and labeled. Our analysis of GameFAQs’ organisational structure in the following section illustrates the significance not only of an overdue study of walkthroughs, but also of a contextual account of these player-produced materials.

Online Collections of Walkthrough Materials:  Pikmin

At the simplest level, a survey of GameFAQs.com reveals that games with rosters of many playable characters such as the Soul Calibur (Namco, 1998-) or Street Fighter (Capcom, 1987-) series have dedicated, in-depth walkthroughs that detail the specific characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses of each protagonist. Importantly, these characters are not merely separated out to make the walkthrough / FAQ lists more user-friendly for the visitor to the site. Rather, because each character presents a varying arsenal of basic and special moves that differently balance defensive versus offensive tactics, the player is encouraged to interrogate the roster in order to either (or perhaps both on different occasions) adopt a character that best suits their preferred playing style or motivation (attacking versus defensive; nimble with light attacks versus lumbering with more powerful assaults; long-range reach attacks versus close-at-hand grappling etc.) or adapt their style to accommodate the particularities of the character. The reward structure of fighting games such as these is frequently articulated around the completion of a specific number of bouts unlocking other techniques, characters or locales with each character revealing a different subset of the total. In this respect, it is inevitable that mastery of the game demands mastery of different styles of play, tactics and strategy.

Where the adoption of different playing styles is hard-coded into game series, such as Street Fighter, Tekken (Namco, 1994-) or SoulCalibur, even more interesting are the ways in which player-produced walkthroughs encourage the development and adoption of different playing styles outside or beyond that which might be implied by the particular complex of characteristics a videogame presents. Games as diverse as Konami’s (1998) Metal Gear Solid and Nintendo’s (2001) Pikmin each inspire the creation of dedicated walkthroughs that map out different ways of approaching gameplay in terms both of short-term tactics and longer-term strategy.

Two examples that demand that the player rethink their engagement with Pikmin are Dragorn’s ‘9-Day Challenge’ and Grenade Guzzler’s ‘Blueless Quest’. Disallowing the use of certain items in the case of the latter, or disrupting the apparent narrative/temporal logic of the game, these walkthroughs place a new ludic challenge on top of the pre-existing ruleset and variously mutate and amplify the ostensible objective of the game. The ‘Blueless Quest’ is particularly revealing as it actually renders the game impossible to complete in its usual sense thereby neatly underlining our assertion here that walkthroughs are not simply documents created to help gamers stuck at particular points or who wish to be propelled through a game’s flow. As the walkthrough author notes, the Blueless Challenge is a deliberately playful one that exists as a means of both eking out additional pleasure and gameplay from Pikmin and demonstrably proving one’s own mastery beyond the existing limits and bounds of the game’s ruleset and resource allocation.

This FAQ will explain how to go through Pikmin without ever getting the blue Onion (interesting note: the blue Candypop Buds never appear without activating the Onion first). There are some parts that you must need blues to get them, but you’ll have enough chance to get the remaining parts so that you’ll be allowed to access The Distant Spring.

Of course, you won’t actually get access to the Final Trial and the end of the game, but this is just for bragging rights and an extra challenge. (Grenade Guzzler, 2006)

It is clear that sites such as GameFAQs codify the rich variety of potential encounters, playing styles, tactics and strategies. GameFAQs’ walkthroughs are simultaneously documents of exploratory modes of subversive play that reveal the existence of coding irregularities and mechanisms by which these reconfigurative exploits and newly created ways of playing may be shared within the community. Perhaps as important as any specific walkthrough or even any type or genre of player-produced text that it may host, however, is the extent of GameFAQs’ collection and, in particular, its ‘archival’ function.

GameFAQs’ Archive and Prefigurative Play

The lists of walkthroughs (or ‘FAQs’ in GameFAQs.com’s own somewhat misleading parlance) that accompany each game perform an archival function that literally sets out and makes manifest the range of different types of engagement and playing styles that any given game has to offer. Even before one delves into the often copious and voluminous pages of a given walkthrough text, this archival role is apparent and plays an important part in making accessible these different playing styles.

Of course, GameFAQs and its plaintext, ASCII art-topped walkthroughs are by no means the only sites at which this archival function can be seen at work. For example, the video walkthroughs available on the StuckGamer.com website for Resident Evil 4 (Capcom, 2005) include: Full Game Video Walkthrough; Separate Ways Video Walkthrough; Assignment Ada Video Walkthrough; Mercenaries Mini-Game Videos; Shooting Gallery Mini-Game Videos; and Cut-Scene Videos. Of significance here is the recording of different ways of playing and the clear signaling of these prior to the first frame flickering into life on the embedded media player. These online collections of walkthrough materials, whether presented in plaintext or high definition video, serve not only to gather together the collective insights of the gamer communities that coalesce around them, but also function as archives and exhibitions of the variety of these materials and the play styles, techniques, tactics and strategies that give rise to these codifications and recordings. In this way, GameFAQs and its ilk are among the most influential sites (in both senses) through which players moderate and mediate play and engagements with games.

It is in the lists of walkthrough, the archiving of play and performance, and the content of the walkthroughs themselves that the relationship between player, game and designer are renegotiated. The encouraging of new styles of play is intimately entwined with the archiving of existing gameplay. As Ashton (forthcoming) argues, given the engagement with those same technological objects (the console and game) as the walkthrough creator, walkthroughs are “prefigurative demonstrations [that] have a strongly performative aspect in the creation of new artifactual experiences”. The notion of the prefigurative is adopted from Martin Barker’s (2004) discussion of ancillary materials. According to Barker, ancillary or satellite texts ‘shape in advance the conditions under which interpretations of film are formed’. Barker (2004) highlights, ‘publicity materials, Press Kits and EPKs, contractually-required interviews and photo opportunities and so on… [that]  …constitute more or less patterned discursive preparations for the act of viewing’. As Barker observes, these ancillary materials are ‘foreknowledge’ that can shape ‘expectations’, and that ‘constitute a discursive framework around a film, a kind of mental scaffolding giving it particular kinds of “support” and providing the means by which people may “climb inside’’ (2004). Rather than interpretations of the film or discursive preparation for viewing, we can see the scaffolding potential of walkthroughs as a blueprint encouraging new styles of play.

As we noted above, instances of emergent or unanticipated gameplay help unveil the configurative dimensions of digital gameplay. Our discussion of the archiving and ordering of walkthroughs highlights the importance of social contexts in shaping players’ expectations and foreknowledge. The notion of the prefigurative helps to emphasize the way in which new styles are encouraged and demonstrates that these have a direct, material and traceable influence on the gameplay of others. Moreover, walkthroughs are not necessarily encountered on an equal footing and by further unpacking the status of these walkthrough accounts and the expertise they imbue, the notion of encouraging new styles of play can be further understood in terms of regulation and relationships of control.

Regulating Play

Taking into account the introductory comments on many walkthroughs posted online by players, a palpable sense of the performance of expertise is apparent. For example, Gameboomer (online) states: ‘we have some of the best gamers from around the globe who are ready to help with all your gaming needs’. A distinction is drawn here between the “best gamers” and “you” – the “ordinary” gameplayer who comes to Gameboomer for assistance. Clearly, these lines are not strict and rigid. An expert in one genre of gameplay, for example massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), or one particular game, for example Everquest, may not be versed in other genres and games. In this sense, the expert in one field may need to come to an expert in another for advice. What is revealing though in terms of how walkthrough creators speak to their audience is the discursive construction of expertise. As Newman (2008: 104) suggests, ‘they are living documentation of the author’s ability to decode the game’. This ability informs how the creator of a walkthrough responds to those coming for assistance and those also potentially offering their own interpretations and advice.

Taking the ‘submissions’ section for Hitman: Blood Money (IO Interactive, 2006) as an example, the distinction between the visitor/potential poster and the walkthrough writer as expert and adjudicator is apparent. The following breakdown with comments from the ‘submissions’ section illustrates this (n.d.: online):

Opportunity to submit: ‘If you’ve discovered a new, interesting method of completing a certain objective and would like to send it in, double-check quickly that the method you’re thinking of isn’t already included in the GameFAQs.com version of this walkthrough’

Adjudicator of methods: ‘On a side note, killing someone in plain sight and having a whole bunch of guards chasing after you doesn’t count as a “method” (though it’s fun, I have to say)’

Standards and trust in own competence (a competence that may be lacking with others): ‘Relate your info as clearly and logically as you can’

A challenging role: ‘Please be patient as I test the various strategies I receive and place them in the walkthrough. This process takes more time than one would think, so bear with me as I proceed with business as usual’

The discussion clearly marks out a relationship in which the walkthrough expert sets the parameters for standards and inclusion.

This sense of performed mastery may also be seen in the ways walkthrough audiences sometimes defer to this form of expertise. In this sense, ‘by following the walkthrough and Guide suggestions, readers are given the chance to learn directly from the experts’ (Newman 2008: 110). Such deference is not given lightly and the peer review and rating of walkthroughs forms a crucial role in shaping the extent to which a walkthrough creator can establish a reputation. As Consalvo (2003: 273) suggests, walkthroughs are ‘a way to establish yourself as an “expert” on that particular game – it can be a status marker, especially on a site like gamefaqs.com, if your walkthrough is highly rated’. The online eulogies that accompanied the passing of Kao Megura (Chris MacDonald) points to the status and presence walkthrough creators can achieve. For example, a posting by ManekiNeko on digitpress stated that ‘Kao has done a lot for the online gaming community, writing dozens of comprehensive Strategy Guides (which were often “borrowed” by unsavory video game magazines and websites)’. Similarly, a posting on WikiFAQs offered the following on Megura/MacDonald:

One of the most prolific and well-respected contributors to this site, he created probably the most well-known and well-read (and not to mention well-written) FAQs on the whole of the Internet back in 1997 for Final Fantasy VII. That guide alone is still used and credited today as the inspiration for countless authors to follow. (WikiFAQs 2005)

Megura is described here as a notable contributor and an influence for gameplayers and other walkthrough creators alike. This second role in influencing other walkthrough creators is further evident in the norms and standards of writing he introduced.

In noting the slippage between second and third person in Kao Megura’s Final Fantasy VII (Square, 1997) walkthrough, Newman (2008: 102) suggests the text operates in the ‘imperative mood’, and that it ‘does not suggest but rather orders the gamer to the follow the instructions’. Further to encouraging new styles of play, the register of the walkthrough text alongside the ‘expert’ positioning crafted by creators and conceded by gameplayers, highlights the prefigurative potential and the relationships of control at stake. In particular, it is useful to note the hierarchical nature of these virtual communities and the performances around walkthrough production. Within these communities, issues of display, recognition, and the management of identity are placed centre stage. Individual authors and teams, often coalescing around specific websites dedicated to particular games or sometimes operating as hubs for walkthrough production, are able to gain peer recognition for their walkthrough contributions. Sometimes, and perhaps most visibly, this recognition is formalised through competitions to create the first walkthrough for a newly released title or to tackle an older “vintage” title that has enjoyed little or no attention. Moreover, recognition also comes through the entrenched, rigorous and well-policed practice of attribution and thorough referencing that ensures that any contribution to a walkthrough text, no matter how small, is recognised, thereby earning its originator a measure of notoriety as their material is linked to and circulated.

From this perspective, the ‘walkthrough may be read as a vehicle through which the author implicitly seeks to take control of and normalize the gameplay of the reader/gamer’ (Newman, 2008: 102). This normalising role emerges in the relationship between contextually situated walkthrough creators and their audiences, and involves forms of identity work and positioning. Through tracing the forms of identity work at stake in fostering the position of “expert”, the following section highlights the relations of control at stake.

Relations of Control

Tony J. Watson (2008: 126) usefully notes that the phrase ‘identity work’ has been used as ‘as a way of dealing with ‘agency’ aspects of identity shaping’ and as an alternative to terms including, ‘identity construction’, ‘identity management’, ‘identity achievement’, ‘identity manufacture’ and ‘identity project’. Following Consalvo and Newman’s earlier comments, expertise can be identified as a form of status or standing that is worked towards and can be established. This process of identity work has been described by Paul du Gay (1997: 314) as the material-cultural making up of ‘persons’, and the ‘adoption of certain habits or dispositions [that] allows an individual to become – and to become recognised as – as particular sort of person’. We might argue that writing in an imperative mode and of demarking expertise in describing the submissions and contact procedure to be used by an ‘ordinary gamer’, are the kinds of habits and dispositions involved in the becoming and recognition of the walkthrough expert.

In Organizing Identity, du Gay (2007: 11) further explores the approach to material-cultural ‘making up of persons’ as follows:

Such an approach involves a shift away from general social and cultural theoretical accounts concerning the formation of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘identity’ towards an understanding of the specific forms of ‘personhood’ that individuals acquire as a result of their immersion in, or subjection to, particular normative and technical regimes of conduct.

This further point is crucial for considering the social context to walkthrough interactions and relationships – how and where are walkthroughs disseminated to audiences and how does this environment structure these interactions and relationships? As walkthroughs mediate game content, the relationship between walkthrough experts and their gameplaying audience is formed within specific contexts and regimes of conduct.

In discussing MMOGs, Taylor (2006: online) addresses the management of online spaces and the ways in which games developers and publishers enfranchise players. For example, Taylor (2006: online) suggests that ‘game designers are always making choices about what kinds of activities and player identities are to be supported to the exclusion of others’. Equally then, what activities and player identities are supported by specific walkthroughs? This refers to regimes of conduct more specifically concerned with videogames fan communities as opposed to between players and designers. As we have noted above, the social context for these interactions is significant. The creation of walkthroughs is only partly a practice that is engaged in to record individual achievement for personal reward. While it is almost certainly true that the individual walkthrough author may treat the creation of their text in much the same way that they use a high score, lap timer or other intrinsic reward indicator to measure their prowess, the walkthrough is a document explicitly for public consumption and, as we have seen, encourages public participation as well as viewing. Contributions might range from corrections and clarifications, through to identifications of overlooked narrative branches or accessible locations, or the imposition of new challenges via the creation of rulesets superimposed over extant game logic. Our discussion of Pikmin and the demands of completion within a specific time limit with or without the use of certain equipment or techniques is evidence of this range. The value placed on individual contributions and often apparently minute morsels of information is clearly foreground here also. Moreover, we should be aware that, despite the frequency of a single-authored designation, walkthroughs typically represent the combined efforts of a community of players.

The player-produced walkthrough reveals itself as not only a document or record of the original game, but also operates as a vector by which the structuring and governance of player agency is managed by other players. Importantly, the walkthrough is not merely a means of generating consensus in approaches to gameplay. The creation of new, and often more difficult, challenges, for instance, serves to further bolster the notion of the existence and, by virtue, the status of masterful “expert” players who have conquered the game and now challenge the reader to test their skills and prowess. Just as the walkthrough author aims to offer the most complete and extensive walkthrough (as evidenced in the ever-increasing version/revision number proudly displayed in the text’s colophon and scrupulously documented in its changelog), so too does the contributor of a new challenge seek both to share their knowledge and simultaneously demonstrate their superiority. To some extent, we might be tempted to view the discursive accounts of performance encoded within the virtual pages of the online textual walkthrough as extensions of the high score imperative that seeks, at once, to provide a mechanism for individual, personal feedback and reflection, and act a public indicator of achievement and attainment (Newman 2008).

Personhood: Content and Expertise

Our point is to note that the walkthrough, in itself, is an intriguing product of gaming culture and one that speaks with some degree of eloquence about the mutability of games and the transformative, configurative nature of play and performance. We want to suggest also that it is instructive to examine not only the individual walkthrough and its production, but also the context in which walkthroughs are collated, archived, encountered, compared and, we would argue, performed. Expertise and status are clearly, and perhaps best, articulated in contexts such as GameFAQs where ratings, reviews, comments and feedback endorse or critique authors’ gameplay skill and knowledge as evidenced and made manifest in their walkthrough texts. We suggest that GameFAQs provides a context in which an expert form of personhood is constituted. Being first to GameFAQs.com with a walkthrough for a new game speaks of one’s connectedness with gaming and participation in the present and future of the form just as the production of the first text investigating a ‘classic’ title connects with a gaming heritage. The incrementally rising version number, displayed alongside the various walkthroughs in the lists displayed for each title curated at GameFAQs.com is itself a visible measure of the author’s mastery, just as the ‘last updated’ date neatly and effectively communicates either the ongoing nature of investigations into the game (speaking of the flexibility and openness of the game and the continued inventiveness of the player/author and their gameplay) or underscores the fact that the investigations concluded some time ago perhaps implicitly suggesting that the gameplay opportunity has been thoroughly exhausted. Moreover, coupled with an accompanying version number that updates from in-progress 0.x revisions into a >1.0 release (mimicking the alpha, beta and public releases of the games software they document and record) or that does away with numbering altogether and simply designates itself as ‘FINAL’ or ‘COMPLETE’, the mastery of the walkthrough’s author(s) is secured. Comparison of version numbers, update statuses, and even attached .txt file sizes (which given the sparsity of the walkthrough’s plaintext formatting offer a blunt but reasonably reliable indication of the scope and extent of the material even if they cannot communicate its quality) are rendered inherently performative within the context of the archival collection of the searchable GameFAQs.com database.

Further to our earlier comments on the significance of organising, labeling and archiving walkthroughs, the GameFAQs regime of conduct that is bound up in the formation of expertise is equally enacted by other visitors to the site who are savvy to file sizes, version numbers, and status indicators. If a walkthrough creator achieves expert status within a specific community form such as GameFAQs, their capacity to shape and regulate the actual gameplay of their walkthrough audience may be significant. It is at this stage that the prefigurative and normalising capacity of walkthroughs is most potent. This point, however, does not rely on the actual forms of gameplay influence and activity that follow. Instead, it is the very social context enmeshed with the expert form of personhood that is crucial. In this sense, identity and mastery are performed through the listings and archiving just as they are in the walkthrough texts themselves.

Accordingly, we can recognise walkthroughs as the practical means and context to develop particular forms of personhood including, for instance, an ‘expert walkthrough writer’ and a ‘deferential gameplayer’. This is, as du Gay (2007) stresses, just one way in which individuals may come to understand and relate to themselves. Our suggestions here, in keeping with the dynamic forms of development and organisation of walkthroughs materials, are not solely concerned with fixing practices of recording gameplay and encouraging new styles, nor with fixing the forms of expertise with the potential to regulate gameplay. Rather, as the use of personhood helps signal, we have sought to stress the social contexts through which gameplay can be mediated, interrogated, reformed and reimagined by players.

Conclusions

Taking the mediation of gamers by gamers as a starting point, we have sought to unpack videogame walkthroughs as a form of mediation in terms of recording playing styles, encouraging new styles, and regulating play. In exploring the recording of playing styles, we have seen that the agency of players in enacting new and unanticipated forms of gameplay is crucial. For example, the discussion of glitches illustrates that walkthroughs demonstrate an investment in documenting and presenting a comprehensive account of potentialities within and beyond the intended game design. In this respect, any conception of the walkthrough that deals only in terms of providing methodical and instructional advice on completing a game needs to be carefully refined with regard to the investigation and probing of boundaries.

Closely connected to the recording of these investigations and diverse forms of play, are the ways in which they may encourage new styles of play that are engaged with by players to expand their own repertoire. Crucial to this point is the recognition of different ways of approaching games. The examples of Dragorn’s ‘9-Day Challenge’ and Grenade Guzzler’s ‘Blueless Quest’ for Pikmin, highlight how walkthroughs can function as places that codify the introduction of new ludic challenges. The kinds of challenges posed in these player-produced walkthroughs provide a useful reminder of the distinctions between these texts and the commercial ‘Official Strategy Guides’. Of further significance is the ‘home’ for this specific material and the ability for players to be able to recognise, locate and make sense of it. GameFAQs, for example, demonstrates how walkthroughs are organised and that specific organisational modes and methods can be used and assumed. In other words, the prefigurative potential of walkthroughs to encourage new styles is made sense of through and with the context within which they are published and encountered.

We argue also for a consideration of the social contexts that shape expectations and foreknowledge as these are formative in establishing expertise and identifying markers of expertise. Our examples drawn from Hitman and Kao Megura’s walkthroughs pointed to the practices of expertise that shape the conventions of walkthroughs and to the ways in which expertise was distinguished. The mediation of games by gamers in this regard is intimately bound up with implicit ways of encouraging and regulating play, and in establishing relations of difference and control. We feel that notions of situated identity work are useful in drawing out these distinctions and exploring how expertise is established.

Finally, although studies of walkthroughs are far from commonplace, we wish to shift the emphasis onto socially situated and contextualised walkthrough practices. Our discussion of personhood highlights the role of identity work and demonstrates that the capacity for an individual to relate to themselves as specific sort of person, for example ‘a walkthrough expert’, is inextricably connected with context and practical means. For example, visible measures of mastery, such as version numbers, update statuses, and attached .txt file sizes, are a central part of the GameFAQs architecture. With regard to relations of control and the potential to regulate forms of gameplay, it is our assertion that the walkthrough context of listings and archiving is as significant as text itself. Moreover, the mediation of games by expert gamers within a specific community form speaks to differentiated capacities to shape and regulate the actual gameplay of their walkthrough audience. In this respect, the walkthrough presents an intriguing and captivating means for tracing the negotiation of situated player relations.

Notes

[1] See also Newman and Simons (2004) for game developer’s comments on walkthroughs as cheating.

Authors’ Biographies

Dr Daniel Ashton is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Bath Spa University (UK). His research interests include media industries and work, identity and organizations, and digital culture. He has published articles on digital gaming with M/C, Participations, and Games & Culture.

Email: d.ashton at bathspa.ac.uk

Professor James Newman teaches Media and Cultural Studies at Bath Spa University. His recent book publications include books include Playing with Videogames (2008), 100 Videogames (2007), Teaching Videogames (2006), and Videogames (2004). James is co-founder and academic project lead for The National Videogame Archive.

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Typically the time of games played on computer systems is considered as linear and progressive. Those studying games talk this way and often linear time is the idiom by which players make sense of their experiences at play. This article focuses on some recent games that explicitly engage players with time, a practice that I argue highlights the complicated relationship between the player, game time, and clock time. It is common to treat videogames as exception from the world, bounded in a kind of “magic circle” (Huizinga, 1938/1955). This can be seen in the most ready explanation of time; the basically uninterrupted arrow of player progress through the space of the game, made canonical by Jesper Juul (2005).  However, there are many other kinds of time in games, and how players use these times says something significant about a game.

There is something more to the magic circle than a condition of pure interiority. The magic circle is play that situates a game and it hosts a special intensity opening to larger forces. This is often ignored in the contemporary use of the term in scholarly discussions of computer-based games. The overly respectful attitude that games are distinct from regular life results in the construction of a “pure” zone strictly internal to games, and time in this zone appears as a line. This article argues that such a vision is incomplete. Time in videogames need not be understood as a single line, or any diagram of lines at all. The complex and overlapping rhythms that crosscut everyday life do not stop at a magical barrier that contains and protects the game; these varied rhythms both influence how games are played, and describe the variety of times that games contain. By attending to other times than a line, we can recognize other patterns in gaming.

I suggest that the act of undoing highlights this particular temporal intensity of videogames. In this paper, I argue that undoing is not simply the restoration of a previous state, but also constitutes another form of action taken in the course of play. Consequently, undoing is discussed as a technology of control that inflects players’ agencies in particular ways. Linear models of time make it impossible to recognise the time of undoing, but loading a saved game to avoid death, taking back turns, and making choices that can be easily reversed have long been common in videogames. As the speed at which players are able to undo increases, they can undo actions at a finer level of granularity and constantly modulate how games process them. These undoings are all ways players engage with games, irrespective of whether the rules or narratives of the game officially recognise them. In the relaxed time made available by undo commands, configuration is privileged over performance death is deferrable, interruption minimised, precision trained, urgency optional, uncertainty resolved, and some of games’ harsh discipline sidestepped. The player thereby arrives in a different set of power relations, which are of control (Deleuze, 1992) rather than discipline (Foucault, 1977).

Undoing in videogames could be considered similar to reloading (comparing to saved documents) or rewinding (comparing games to linear playback media). “Undo” refers to an operational logic common to many techniques. Undoing creates a record of the past, which it brings into operation by reversing action or restoring recorded states. This is the mechanism of undo in other software, and is not the same as film, video, or tapes. As Lev Manovich (2008: 59) has written of the paintbrush tool in graphic editing software (which is, of course, not a paintbrush at all), the instances where it ‘behaved more like a real physical paintbrush were just particular cases of a much larger universe of new behaviors made possible in a new medium.’ Undo provides a time that is interactive; rewind (and action that looks like rewinding) is a particular case. Looking at undoing draws attention to the particularity of different cases while making space for a broader understanding of how these practices have a similar way of treating the one that plays the game. There are other ways to correct, fix, and change things in a game; undo features offer to entirely negate user action – including other fixes – in order to restore an earlier state, sometimes on a very small scale. This changes player behavior, yet is an optional extra in each game – no one has to undo. Still, whether controlled, seduced, or persuaded, players do undo, and this becomes a social practice of manipulable time. Undoing is a practice of play that illustrates how videogaming is temporally imbricated in everyday life, rather than apart from it as many “magic circle” arguments suggest. Such practices of play function, like everyday life, ‘not as someplace untouched by power, but rather as a figure for the proliferation, saturation, and intensification of power (which is also to say, resistance) relations’ (Nealon, 2008: 107-108).

These intrusions into the presumed line of game time are not just cheats or hacks. They are instances of counterplay: modes of manipulating game time are folded into the game. But is it cheating? Almost everyone who plays a game is aware of cheating, and has some response to it (Consalvo, 2007). This results in a discursive formation that is more than just a word. However, practices that could be considered cheating only count when known as cheating, and to the extent they are named as such. Consider three examples:

• to restart a level over and over until the first few moves are successful;
• to take back a turn; and
• to save then try one chance event, reloading until it works.

Probably the last of these is cheating (luck manipulation), but the second is a legitimate game mechanic (especially in turn-based games), and the first a regular player practice. These player approaches to time can shift into game design (Lindley, 2005). Undoing takes form beyond variations on a reload cycle (saving the game and loading it when things go wrong). Emulators allow manipulation of the game state at a new level, and some games – Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (UbiSoft Montreal, 2003) and Braid (Number None, 2008) in particular – allow diegetic rewinding, providing designed affordances to let players do something like what they would have done anyway. What counts as cheating at one time may become routine in another case, or at another time. It is this folding in of what exceeds “proper” play that characterises counterplay, even as it marks its limit.

This article will describe and respond to homogeneous game time, review a few cases of undoing in particular games, and close with the argument that undoing in games makes for a post-disciplinary form of power in games. By intervening in the usual simplification of time to linear models, this argument aims to open our sense of time to the surging forces that engage the players of computer-based games.

Homogeneous Game Time

Past treatments of game time have overemphasized its continuity and the self-identity of its present moment. If time in videogames was, in fact continuous and linear, then undoing would constitute an impossibility or exception from game time. Discontinuity can appear as contradiction. Recent work on time in videogames deals with: discontinuities and multiple times as limits to formal models of time, hoping to fix leaks in models of time (Hitchens, 2006); situating temporal experience psychologically (Nitsche, 2007); and interpreting games as difference and repetition (Mukherjee, 2009). Barry Atkins reconciles the contradiction of discontinuities by interpreting the supposed linearity of time in games, which obscures the reality of play experience, as a ‘post-hoc narrativization of the play experience’ (2007: 244). Atkins’ intervention should not be taken lightly: repetitive narration forms our common sense and makes theoretical models of linear time intuitive. As a consequence, theories of game time tend to also follow this pattern of summarising the experience of play as blankly linear. This remains the default understanding of time in games, even in the recent work that adds forks, parallel lines, and segments to the model (Nitsche, 2007; Zagal and Mateas 2007). I suggest that, by undoing the model of linear time, diverse temporalities come to light, and that these represent more than occasional, rogue strategies.

Jesper Juul’s (2005) formal model of gametime introduces central conventions for diagramming the topic. There are two parallel times for rule-bound play and imaginative fiction. The diagram for play-time is a ray: a solid line of whatever length, whose width is irrelevant, with an arrow-head finishing it at one end. The arrows of time in his diagrams ‘correspond to a basic sense of now when playing a game’ (Juul, 2005:143). The correspondence is itself a kind of post-hoc narrativization. The ray seems to be a ‘homogeneous and empty time’ (Benjamin, 1940/2005).  It does not claim to illustrate a container for events, but gestures towards our usual sense of the ongoing present in ‘the time span taken to play a game’ (Juul, 2005: 142). It is both a model and a diffuse feeling characterising play. Fictional time, on the other hand, foregrounds the explicit diegetic organisation of time. [1] Diegesis refers to the elements of a representation that amount to an entire world. For Juul, the fictional time that matters is daily rhythm, hours on the clock, or the current year. Many games have no indication what day or time it is, or how events are linked by cause or time, but Juul’s concept demands some large-scale time of invariant intervals. This means translating polymorphous times that also exist in fiction into some kind of line parallel to play time. There is more to time in games than such a line.

The particular durations by which the experience of a game is built vary in structure and kind. The timing involved in executing combinations in Street Fighter 4 (Dimps/Capcop, 2009) is precise and rapid, unlike the patient time spent waiting for enemies to respawn in Quake 3 (iD, 1999), efficient time spent moving through empty places in Tony Hawk: Pro Skater 2 (Neversoft, 2000), or the hurried time of scouting a dangerous and unknown area in Half-Life (Valve, 1998), when the player knows that they will probably die. These wild times of in-game events are not just subjective experiences, but are the mutual adaptation between variations in a game’s procedures and actions of the body playing. Juul’s model subsumes these times: fictional time means clock time. In this tradition, Zagal and Mateas (2007: 519) interpret time as cycles and durations, which are ‘measured by counting events in a cycle.’ Ben Cousins (2005) suggests translating games into the terms of empty divisible timelines can be very useful for game design. There is, however, nothing inevitable about the habitual translation of other times into the solid line with an arrowhead whose width is meaningless. Players translate game time with changing patience and mood, into the terms of a precarious break stolen at work, as a way to relax, or into the terms of a work ethic that disparages play altogether. To summarise, the time within games is polymorphous, and translated into more than one other time. The clock’s time need not be privileged.

The present moment of gaming is an asynchronous present, ‘a fractured sense of time evoked by the figuration of competing contexts of experience’ (Lim, 2005). If the first recourse in common sense is to imagine present time as a ray, perhaps there is a reason. The formation of time in modernity has contributed to this common sense, through various institutions: e.g. work discipline, church rules, and the intensely scheduled institutions of education (Adam, 2004; Glennie and Thrift, 1996). (In this regard, those who play games and those who study them will tend to treat time in the same way.) Bliss Cua Lim (2009) argues that translation of other times into the modern, progressive, time of the clock and calendar “works” in some sense, but also fails to recognise what cannot be translated. This impossibility of translation is dubbed ‘immiscible time’ to emphasize that some forms of time cannot be mixed with others (Lim, 2009). Modern time consciousness inclines, but does not force, individuals toward translating other times into their own. Other times should not be forgotten, and will not let themselves be. Their translation occludes something that resists, which haunts modern time as it ‘refuses the idea that things are just “left behind,” that the past is inert and the present uniform’ (Lim, 2001: 288). This fractures the present, making it impossible for all cases of the present to ever be fully synchronous. Competing contexts for experience, ghosts or saved games, evoke that sense of fracture, which might otherwise remain imperceptible. The ray of time is a usual recourse in understanding time, and is haunted by these immiscible, untranslatable moments.

Two kinds of time that game time has translated, and is therefore haunted by, are the complexity of everyday life and fixed data. Whereas games involve play, which is active, data is static and passive. Whereas games are an exception to the ordinary, our usual experience of time is plural. These two contrasts can make the time of gaming look pure, flat, and progressive; they reduce the existence of time to a measure of time. This happens at the level of theory and sensibility, which are never wholly distinct. But why should other times establish the purity of time in the game? Why is each understood as juxtaposition rather than reinforcement?

In the first case, play is separated from everyday life through the persistent conceit of the “magic circle”, an argument founded on the principle that play is an activity with its own times and spaces. The metaphor of a magic circle comes from quotations of Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Huizinga, 1938/1955), a book whose project was to understand all of social life as composed of various kinds of games. In comparison, contemporary social theory is more likely to see society as predictable patterns, affective performances, or basic structures. The phrase ‘magic circle’ has often been quoted from a paragraph in the first chapter of the book that discusses the social relation by which a special space is marked out for a game . [2] Huizinga (1938/1955: 10) writes that ‘[a]ll play moves and has its being within a playground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course.’ A list of examples follows, and the text asserts that there is no formal difference between any of them. The magic circle appears as an odd entry in this list, as the others are places for competitions, performances, and games. How is magic play? Huizinga is trying to unify diverse fields of human interaction and social life into a study of gaming, seen as usually competitive and open to contingency. Special places in society host games by which social life is lived. A circle for magic, trance, or ritual is just another space of play. Huizinga (1938/1955: 18-27) is not making a reductive, secular interpretation of ritual, but a key claim about play’s ability to make a difference, despite being, at times, pointless. It’s not that ritual is no more than profane play; it’s that play allows transcendence of quotidian seriousness and consecrates a connection to the supernatural: it opens to greater forces. Recent interrogations of the concept of “magic circle” in videogaming have interpreted it as a puzzle piece that connects with others (Juul, 2008), or as one frame among many that coexist (Crawford, 2008; Consalvo, 2009). These approaches, like Alexander Galloway’s distinction of diegetic and non-diegetic (Galloway, 2006), still point to a divide between time of the videogame and some other time that we must suppose is our own. What is that other time?

‘There is no single time, only a multitude of times which interpenetrate and permeate our daily lives,’ (Adam, 1995: 12). Multiple co-mingling technologies of time, natural rhythms, and temporal experiences coexist. Contemporary life is lived at an accelerated pace; it has drifted from the days when institutional deployments of clock time regularised life in mass society. Rob Cover (2006) argues that the familiar comment that games take too much time ignores the fact that games require a kind of free time those who play games do actually have. Newspapers, television, and film contain frequent set stopping points (chapters, endings), occur on a regular schedule set to hours of work and sleep, and anticipate demands throughout the day. Games are different. Increased unemployment and flexible schedules make available the sort of free time that can handle five hours of gaming that starts in the early afternoon (Cover, 2006). Even at work, there’s some time for gaming. Solitaire (Microsoft 1990-) and Snood (Dobson, 1996) are no strangers to office computers, and their time seems pure and linear once abstracted from the busy timings of the surrounding workplace. It is quite easy to interpret the magic circle as a justification for ignoring the complex times of environments in which games are played, an intellectual move put to use by Tychsen and Hitchens (2009: 1-2), and made generally in thinking about game time. A consequence of this mode of analysis is that videogames are presented with a utopian clarity, divorced from the complications of everyday life.

A second foil is the fixed data of the saved game. The videogame is an ‘action-based medium’ (Galloway, 2006: 3), as software is process operating on data. But when it saves the game state, it returns process to data. For console systems using storage media that allow read-only access, saving the game may be the only time when any user input will result in writing data, and this has to be done with a different memory medium, such as a memory card. If a saved game is a product rather than process, the time of play is one of process and action. But play-time is haunted by this data. Play is the living world and saved games are the graveyard: and the graveyard of saved games, where process freezes into data, matters in play. This effect is more pronounced with quick saves, auto-saves, and emulator save states. What breaches the realm of diegetic player action in the practice of restarting a level becomes a reflex action, as quick to the hands that play as the actions of running or jumping. Saved games and everyday life both offer dramatic juxtaposition by which play’s time can become a ray.

The trouble with the analogy of a magic circle is that, in any quick check, a person can only be understood as in or out. Some argue that, if there is no strict border to play, and no magic to it, then there is no magic circle. Pargman and Jakobsson (2008: 5-7) identify this as a tendency in games scholarship, pointing out also that hardcore players often feel exactly this way about gaming. For most academic writers, though, the concept is not so easy to abandon. Juul (2008: 65) summarises the importance of Huizinga’s concept succinctly: ‘a game must be integrated into a context in order to be experienced as separate from that context.’ Because a tennis court was built, referees recognise and discuss the boundaries, someone clears the ground of debris, and players show up at the right time, the game can begin its transcendent, dramatic magic. When someone argues that tennis is a phenomenon that only exists within the white lines painted on the ground, the concept is overstretched. Tennis is played on a court, but there is more to the game than what is within its boundaries. A better example than a magic circle, from Huizinga’s own work, is a courthouse, where events are not isolated from the rest of the world, but are brought to a different intensity. With this understanding, complex functions of temporality that underlie games (process and data) and surround them (social environments) do not disappear, but attain a greater significance than ever. The magic circle should be seen as an example of the power of play, in a situation that amounts to more than a pastime. It is open to usually hidden forces, as the power of law manifests itself in a courthouse. This is inextricable from social relations that situate the event and may, in turn, be influenced by play. It is in the special context of play that a relaxed and reversible time can be encountered most directly.

Undoing in Games

To play Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (Neversoft, 1999) and its first sequel encourages a heightened intensity of rapid and precise input. Controls make the skater jump, grind, and do tricks. Each additional trick performed in an unbroken sequence not only adds its value to the trick total, but also increases the combination’s multiplier by one. After a 500 point trick, another trick worth 300 points will actually add that and multiply the running total (now 800) by two; the second trick yields more than twice the score of the previous one. A third trick in an unbroken series adds its value and boosts the overall multiplier to three. Tricks in combinations always score better. For each scored run of a level, you only get two minutes. Insofar as a videogame rhetorically represents something as a process, the game may persuade players that certain actions will affect the model in a desirable way. The procedural rhetoric of the game (Bogost, 2007) claims strongly that doing well means doing tricks constantly, linked in absurd combos, almost the entire time. After comparing top scores with someone who plays this way, players realize they can get much higher scores, unlocking areas and winning medals that they couldn’t get before. Most levels are designed so the run starts strong, often at the top of a hill. Constant tricks and big combos are a good goal, but the key to getting it done, besides practice, is to eliminate errors made early in a two-minute run that waste valuable time and make a high score impossible. Just like throwing in a flip trick on each jump between constantly varied grinds becomes an instinct, restarting when the run could have started stronger becomes strictly sensible. Or, to phrase it again in terms of procedural rhetoric, the game makes the persuasive case that in addition to constant tricks and big combos restarting is a key to success.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater entices the player to restart the level. Hit start and it’s the first option on the menu. It didn’t take me long to discover I could hit those two buttons before I’d have to think about it. Risky openings with a big payoff are just too tempting when I undo all the bad takes. As I surrender decision making to my hands, I trust them, and implicitly the stimulation to which they respond. In this moment, ‘the Video Game is an engine of control’, and while I feel like I am the pure winding, spinning, turning flight of the simulated skateboard, I am also just ‘following orders’ (Rondeau, 2005). Swept up in engrossing challenge, transcending the ordinary, I restart to undo an imprecise landing or mistimed jump.

By the third sequel, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 (Neversoft, 2002), the game has more than just two-minute runs from the same starting point. Instead, the player takes on challenges from non-player characters around a much larger level. When undertaken, the challenge begins somewhere in the level with a new timer. Challenges are straightforward and mostly short. The usual button combination to restart the level now restarts just the challenge. My experience of the level as an entirety is broken into smaller sections, into particular challenges. Memory helps assemble a solution to only the challenge at hand, and need not retain a larger picture. Instant correction partially displaces memorisation of sequences and full levels.

The difference between the earlier and later games, in this case, is granularity. In Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, the entire level had to be restarted, undoing every action since the level began. In Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4, only one challenge would be. This finely grained version of the typical save/reload cycle allowed Half-Life (Valve, 1998) some of its most interesting mechanics on the PC. Entering a menu in order to save is standard for first-person shooters, and provides a barrier between play and saving. It discourages rapid saves, by making them a bigger break from play. In Half-Life, the game automatically saves rather often. The F6 key saves to a quick save slot and F9 instantly loads the quick save. The distance between the player and saving has shrunk. Is it surprising that the distance between the player and death shrinks as well? The protagonist of this story is an ordinary physicist caught in the middle of an alien invasion and the Marines sent to kill everyone. In this situation, most physicists die. Things that did not kill in other first person shooters now do. In multiplayer versions of the game, the pace leaves amateurs dead. Death can happen in an instant, but so can loading the last quick save.

Rosi Braidotti (2007) writes: ‘death is overrated.’ Although the narcissistic subject cannot imagine the world without itself, understanding death as part of a generative process orients the subject to a different understanding of life, a step further from anthropocentrism (Braidotti, 2007). Death generally functions in games as a condemnation of what the player has done, as a limit to experimentation, and as a reinforcement more constant than far off goals of victory (Klastrup, 2007). Death in games is less grave than in cinema, for example (Kennedy, 2002), or contemporary political rule (Mbembe, 2003). In most games, however, it retains a sense of drama and terminality. Death provokes a reaction in most games, whether it encourages trust, demands the player insert a coin, or provides a moment of tranquility between sessions of anxiety. In Half-Life, death is all part of the process.

Imagine an even finer grain of saving. Console systems have traditionally kept gameplay challenging and menu navigation to a minimum by the use of save points, whereas games on computer platforms allow saving any time. Console emulators are programs that imitate the function of a particular console but run on a personal computer, allowing people to play a Super Nintendo game on a laptop, for example. Emulation requires devoting random access memory to the game; writing all this RAM to a file creates a save state at any moment. Players share save states online and have learned how to edit many of them. Save states potentially allow for players to gain access to any possible moment in the game. Indeed, emulator save states offer a valuable tool for research, like a bookmark in a novel or an exact time for a DVD title. This navigation through all actions taken is not immediately recognisable as undoing, but this is precisely the goal of experimental undo systems in other software. A perfect undo system is a manager of all actions taken at any time on any version of a document, it includes support for branched work and allows changes made in old versions to be propagated forward. This is a minor player practice, with similarity to idealised undo systems in software, and it is the basis for other use of emulators.

Reading through the RAM allows a form of cheating unique to emulators. It basically works like this: pause the game, search the memory for a particular value (such as your current number of lives), then play some more and pause again. By searching again for all memory addresses whose current value matches the number of lives you now have, and repeating this process, the address that specifies number of lives can be located, and its value changed. All memory locations of the game-as-process can be identified at a frozen moment and viewed as data. Modifying this data supersedes ordinary manipulation by the game itself: you can lock in the number of extra lives at two for good. The player modifies the game’s memory. In these cheats, aspects of the game state become memory locations subject to control by the player, assisted by an emulator cheating system. Actions and game state are arbitrarily configurable, not bound by laws of thermodynamics or dependent on perspective. In this moment, the game becomes a set of value capable of being changed as well as changed back. Done or undone.

These affordances of emulation make possible the performance practice of tool-assisted speedruns. A speedrun is a very fast and efficient play-through of a whole level or game. Tool assistance generally refers to emulation tricks. Newman (2008: 141) states:

The free availability of savestates is a critical affordance of the emulator as gamers can tackle the game in extremely small sections which can be returned to if a subsequent error is made. The emulator savestate is the equivalent of an ‘Undo’ feature on a word processor and effectively renders the performance non-committal as steps can easily be undone and the performance rewound. The availability of emulators with their slow motion and savestate affordances make possible an entirely new way of playing video games.

To play a speedrun is to perform a perfect game, to manage urgency and infinitely defer failure. The process of recording a good speedrun is arduous, competitive, and demands careful planning. Individuals or teams put together maps of entire levels and chart an optimal route. The emulator runs the game at a slower speed, and the run is built almost frame by frame. Failure and other exceptions to the vision of perfect play need only occur when most efficient, when they save time and don’t stop success (Wikipedia contributors, 2009). If taking a hit is the fastest way to go, it’s probably worth it.

Gone are uncertainty, humiliation and death. The only real challenges are delays. Play as time management, as micromanagement of player input. Failure requires recognising an error and enforcing consequences. It’s usually an uncertain process of self-doubt and overcoming resolved only by the player quitting or computer stating that it’s ‘game over.’ But, here, failure can be identified easily and removed. Virtuoso play becomes possible by erasing every misstep, but for this reason is only possible in a video of the run. It is not embodied in live play, but is a material form of ideal play.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Braid provide the player the means to undo actions and rewind the game. Sands of Time is a successful mainstream third-person action game released for the major consoles and PC with a slew of sequels (and a film scheduled for release in May 2010). Braid is an independent game known for its innovative gameplay, made by Jonathan Blow and available only on Xbox Live Arcade for the first year after its release (now ported to Mac, PC, and the PlayStation Network). Running and jumping are important to the games, therefore, so are the details of the terrain. Precise movements are necessary to get at hard to reach places. Both games allow the player to turn back time, although for different purposes. This means that death is rarely a problem in the games, and in neither is sequence memorisation especially important. This may improve the replay value of the game: you don’t get sick of the levels because you don’t have to do them a hundred times. Rewind-like features produce new attractors. The player does not restart, the character does not even die, and there is no interruption in play. A different game results. For Jonathan Blow, Braid’s designer, this seems to be an ethical point about designing gameplay alternatives to ceaseless killing and simulated bad-boy violence. For Sands of Time, television advertisements associated the prince’s temporal power with DJing. [3] In Sands of Time, time control is a power of an enchanted dagger. In Braid, it’s a fact of nature, and varies between the six worlds. Developers may like the idea that diegetic undoing lets the player overcome nasty challenges while staying immersed in the game’s world. Neither game makes money on coins dropped into an arcade machine, they both depend on someone buying the game once and enjoying it enough to recommend it to others. This revenue model bases its relative stability on overworking young developers, but perpetuates itself with extremely popular games, and their long line of expansions and sequels (de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford, 2005).

Sands of Time invites comparison with the Xbox-exclusive Ninja Gaiden (Team Ninja, 2004). Both are third-person action games focused on acrobatics, puzzle solving, and hand-to-hand combat that came out within a year of each other and were both available on Xbox. However, Ninja Gaiden is very hard, and Sands of Time only gets really difficult in a couple of key fights. The harder game is associated with a hardcore audience, while Sands of Time offers something more accessible. The basic challenge of Sands of Time is not combat. Acrobatics that appear difficult are rather simple to execute in most cases, but do require the player knowing what ledges and columns are in range for what moves, and how to link these moves together quickly. Ninja Gaiden mixes combat and acrobatics, does not allow rewinding, and appeals to a more hardcore taste. In Sands of Time, the ability to configure trumps the ability to perform. The game’s challenge is not in execution but in choosing the appropriate move and timing it right. Usually there is just one appropriate move. Part of the experience of being forced through the game, as if it were a rail shooter, is that save points in the game also show a preview of the prince navigating the next few situations, letting you know what to do in advance. This preview feature seems to confirm Rondeau’s (2005) interpretation of gamers as obedient to orders. The problem with Rondeau’s model is that videogames are not simply imperatives, they also deploy subtle techniques of persuasion that are more usefully understood through Bogost’s theory of procedural rhetoric (Bogost, 2007).

Sands of Time and Braid, due to the centrality of undoing in their gameplay, suggest a different rhetorical strategy for habituating players into the game. The player soon learns that time must be controlled, dangerous actions attempted because they can be undone, urgency defused, sequences learned and completed in one ongoing experiment (rather than planned in a series of earlier attempts). It is not a challenge of performance, but of figuring out what is possible, trying it, and seeing what paths are viable. Although when undoing is built into games it seems to make them less “hardcore,” the style of play that undo affords is just like that of “hardcore” players who optimize plans rather than react emotionally. A menu of available actions, with time’s passage suspended, situates players within a flow chart of events that offer possibilities and combinations that the player goes through repeatedly (Crogan, 2003: 291-292). The usual harsh imperatives of a game, such as falling off a ledge and dying, can have exceptions, by rewinding out of them.

Control and Interactive Time

Undoing is a form of interaction that allows direct player manipulation of time by negating the most recent past and returning to a state just before. This contradicts the model of time as a ray that is a mainstay of both scholarly game studies and everyday discussions of gaming. That model envisions a homogeneous process time (rays and lines) juxtaposed against the fixity of stored data (e.g. saved games) and the complex crosscutting timings of everyday life. That model ignores the many forms of time at play in videogames that cannot be reduced to some kind of line. By looking at specific cases of undoing in videogames, I argue that a linear model of time is particularly ineffective at understanding time’s importance to player action, the relation of times between situations, and the data that software (as a process) needs and uses. Undoing fits into the time that people actually have for games. Undoing uses fixed data to change what the ongoing present moment of play is. Undoing also changes how play proceeds. The magic circle, as an intuitive understanding of play and a scholarly concept, has encouraged a deficient model of time. To the extent it secures a blank space for game time, it is misleading. I argue that the magic circle refers to a positively special site, not to an unqualified exception or impermeable membrane. The magic circle, like a courthouse, is a site (with porous boundaries) where play encounters directly something that is immanent (yet less visible) in other domains. In play, certain potentials become actualized. Play is not just an exception from a life that is otherwise real. Play can be understood in terms of its intensifications and diffractions of larger forces that a game opens out to. Following how undo haunts the time of play demonstrates the significance of interactive time in relations of power.

Undo makes more efficient the site of game-player control. No longer does a player explore a game, knowing they will probably not win on this life anyway. Nor does she restart with each death from the beginning of the game. A series of rotating platforms high in the sky risks less wasted effort for the player who can undo falling. The time of discipline shrinks and becomes variable. Deleuze describes this shift from the enclosed situation of a school or prison to newer techniques of power, arguing that ‘[e]nclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point’ (Deleuze, 1992: 4). The one who plays is not propelled forward in continuous game time, and perhaps never has been. Death, urgency, and sequence memorisations cease, with undo, to be necessities. This is a departure from the disciplinary tradition wherein games forcefully show players that they have failed. Instead, undo functions as a diffraction and materialisation of a society saturated by power relations that work by flexible control.

The many time systems available in contemporary media foreground the issue of time, and include ways for users to interact with it. These means of interaction join the general vocabulary of navigation that defines contemporary life with software. In comparison, the actions used in linear entertainment media are easier and fewer: play, fast forward, rewind, stop and pause (Kozel, 2000).  Today, menus, edits, documents, versions, commands, transfers, and quitting are habits. As Galloway suggests, ‘to live today is to know how to use menus. Acts of configuration in videogames are but a footnote to this general transformation’ (2006: 17). These new forms of action, stabilised by human interface guidelines as well as programming tradition, are not just increasingly common user experiences. They shape practices that impact the everyday life of everyone else.

Along with many other places, the key sites for Foucault’s (1977) analysis of disciplinary power have, for decades now, been switching over to software, changing the techniques of power that organise conduct (Manovich, 2008: 2-3). Games function as a laboratory for intelligible interfaces, what is fun, and for what might work in the generalisation of interactivity. This is the ‘gaming paradigm’ Brian Massumi (2007: 77) sees expanding to other domains, where it promises to ‘make the useful less boring and the serious more engaging. It is performance-enhancing. It’s big business.’

The game designer who defines games as a series of interesting choices, Will Wright, describes, in an interview with Celia Pearce, a game he would like to make with ‘a smooth slider [for time] where you could go forward and backward and rebranch very, very easily so that at any point I could just pull the slider back and then right there do something, then pull it back again and do something different’ (Pearce, 2002). His vision draws on time travel, branching timelines in collaborative software development, and the design of linear undo systems. Technology could represent the present as a state that is one location among many possible. Wright’s scroll bar of time remediates time as a ray. Movement backward is a traversal of saved data for comfort (retreat). Movement forward is automation to skip uninteresting times or for consultation (oracular). The player self-modulates (with finer granularity), making the present permanently optional. The techniques of a control society come to be taken for granted. The opening lines of Sands of Time express a rosy vision of this unsettled time of possibility.

Most people think Time is like a river that flows swift and sure in one direction. But I have seen the face of Time, and I can tell you, they are wrong. Time is an ocean in a storm.

The time sense expressed as the ray of play-time has never been our only recourse in discussion of games, but it has been dominant. By its logic, much work has begun that now needs the technology of a measurable, divisible, homogeneous, time that translates other times into its regularity. Theoretical work helps game studies come to terms with empirical complexity. It also provisions our encounters with other topics that should be considered related. Theories of game time can accommodate interactive time, its translation, and the limits of its translation. If players understand the games they play (and this may be part of what it means to play a game), then the sense of time they experience need not be a river, ray, or arrow, guarded by magical borders, but an uncertainty open to mobile and surging forces coming from all directions: an ocean in a storm.

Notes

[1] The chapter on time in Half-Real uses the phrase “fictional time”, whereas the essay on which the chapter is based uses “event time” (Juul, 2004). This stabilises the book’s focus on diegetic fiction, whereas the earlier term feels more at home in a technical discussion of gaming as event.

[2] Technically, Huizinga’s often-quoted argument only describes the space of play, and not its time. Unfortunately, his comments on time are less than energising when applied to games running on computer systems. Regarding time, he states that games are traditional, repeatable, and play themselves to a natural conclusion. Videogames require a gaming system, are not replayed so much as consumed, are rarely played from beginning to end in one sitting, and are not generally understood by players as a tradition.

[3] Gametrailers.com currently hosts multiple TV spots for Sands of Time here.

Author’s Biography

Chuk Moran is in the PhD program of the Department of Communication at UC San Diego. He studies time, power and subjectivity in computer games and everyday software.

Email: cwmoran at weber.ucsd.edu

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Discussions of ‘control’ in games often center on players and their myriad attempts to push back upon the systems that seek to constrain them. The fact that players resist the constraints imposed upon them is not surprising, nor is it surprising that counterplay and control are such rich topics for game studies academics. In this article, I argue that players are invited by games to bend the rules. It is in the very nature of play to find the movement between the rules, and for many players the ‘fun’ in play is the inherent challenge of attempting to master, defeat, or remake games’ formal structures. These rationalities of play preclude blind obedience to the rules and have distinct implications for how games are governed. While there have been numerous studies of players who bend or break the rules (Consalvo, 2007; Foo and Koivisto, 2004; Dibbell, 1998; Kolko and Reid, 1998; Williams, 2006; Mnookin, 1997) and players who alter and re-make the rules in their role of co-producers (Sotamaa, 2009; Kücklich, 2005; Humphreys, 2005; Taylor, 2006b), there is little research on game development companies and their attempts to harness these rationalities of play and uphold the rules beyond the reflexive writings of game designers themselves (Curtis, 1992; Morningstar and Farmer, 1991; Koster, 2002).

The first section of this article highlights the role of control in games and puts forward both Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and govermentality studies as tools for better understanding this control. I argue that the ‘network’ is an important way to conceptualise how a game is governed as well as to understand control and counterplay. I conclude by emphasizing the role of developers in game networks. In the next section, I discuss the role rules have in systems of control, and how the concept of ‘play’ interacts with both rules and control. I then argue that game networks can be destabilised and revitalised by player behaviours that are unanticipated by developers and designers, and make a case for focusing on game development processes in future research. Although players constantly engage in an ongoing act of negotiation with the game network, often re-inscribing and remaking it (Taylor, 2006a), they still operate in an environment mostly shaped by game developers and designers. With the growth of both ‘emergent’ and productive play in games, the work of game development increasingly includes predicting and governing human behaviour through both technical and social means. Thirdly, I draw from two case studies that employ governmentality and ANT, in order to briefly postulate potential methods for researching control in games. Finally, I emphasize how both emergent and rule-breaking behaviour in games makes control more complex and, as such, is in need of further study. Before concluding, I discuss the implications of governance and technology in games and draw analogies between games and other situations that, like games, are geared towards encouraging innovation rather than stifling it.

Games, Rules, and Control

To understand control in games, we must first understand the relationship between rules and games. The very definition of what a ‘game’ is introduces the tension between following the rules of the game, and the play between the rules. Jesper Juul (2005:36, emphasis added), synthesizing historical definitions of ‘game’, argues that games have six essential features:

A game is a rule-based system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels emotionally attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are negotiable.

Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (2003:80, emphasis added), taking a similar approach, define a game as ‘a system in which players engage in artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome’. The emphasis placed on rules and formal structures is a commonality in all definitions of “game”. Rules define the game, its limits, and constrain player behaviour accordingly (Juul, 2005:32). They describe the formal structure of the game and operate on multiple levels: operational rules are usually synonymous with written rules and are guidelines the player require in order to play, constitutive rules are the logical mathematical and formal structures that underlie the game, such as code, while implicit rules are the unwritten rules of the game and concern proper game behaviour and etiquette (Salen and Zimmerman, 2003: 130).

Rules prohibit more efficient in favour of less efficient means. As a result, the challenge of a game is to achieve the goal while working under the constraints of rules. The rules construct the possibility space of the game (i.e. what players can and cannot do) – they are “affordances” that permit certain actions while prescribing and preventing others. By accepting to play, players consent to the constraints posed by the rules. What makes “digital games” different from traditional games (e.g. card games, board games, etc.) is that the rules are embedded in the hardware and the software of the game, thus freeing players from having to enforce the rules themselves. Digital technology enables the automation of complex procedures, allowing games to be more flexible by storing and restoring different game states, and more complicated by concealing some of the mechanics from players (e.g. physics engines, statistical calculations that compute damages, etc.).

This is where the issue of control comes in. The automation and opacity of the complex rules and procedures that govern games are at the heart of control. Technological systems – even seemingly benign ones like digital games – provide a set of rules, or scripts, encouraging certain uses and interactions and denying others (Winner, 1986; Akrich and Latour, 1992). For many theorists (Castells, 2000; Lessig, 1999), what makes computers and software systems such as games important topics of research is that the environments they create are entirely built and dependent upon digital architecture – the coded rules that determine how the software will operate and what functions will be allowed and disallowed. Accordingly, it only makes sense for researchers interested in control in games to examine who makes the rules; how these digital environments are built and why they are built in the ways they are. In the following paragraphs, I outline two theoretical approaches for examining these ‘rule-makers’ and conceptualising control in games.

ANT is both a theoretical perspective and a method for research. [1] It highlights the local contexts of technological production (i.e. how new technologies such as games are made) and the ways in which technology and knowledge are transported to a variety of new local contexts across the globe. Game software, in particular, is a paradigm example of the transportation of technology, moving from the development studio to the production facility, to the retail outlet, to players’ homes with ease. The application of ANT results in an innovative approach to game studies: to conceptualise each game as a network that links many diverse elements together. In order to study the construction of the network (i.e. each individual game), researchers must focus on its constituent parts, both human and non-human, and their relationships. These parts include, but are not limited to, the many humans that produce the game: developers, producers, programmers, graphic artists, playtesters, PR personnel, administrators, etc., and those that play the game, critics, lobbyists, and academics, to name a few. The network includes non-humans as well, including the technology the game is written on (e.g. discs and cartridges), the technology it is played on (e.g. consoles, cell phones, and computers), the technology that is used to produce the game (e.g. game engines, graphics software, and hardware), and the written material describing and supporting the game (e.g. game manuals, walkthroughs, and fan forums). Perhaps the most concise argument to be made for utilising an ANT approach to studying games comes from T.L. Taylor (2009: 332):

In the space of interrelations lie the dynamic processes of play. Thinking about games as assemblage, wherein many varying actors and unfolding processes make up the site and action, allows us to get into the nooks where fascinating work occurs; the flows between system and player, between emergent play and developer revisions, between practices and player produced software modifications, between local (guild) communities and broader (server) cultures, between legal codes, designer intentions, and everyday use practices, between contested forms of play, between expectation and contextualization.

By looking at games as a ‘circuit of relations’ that runs between human and non-human actors we develop a deeper understanding of the complexity of games, and the technical apparatuses that structure and support our gameplay experiences.

A successful network is the result of managing all these actors so that they work together towards a common goal. [2] The game network is precarious due to the fact that there is no common goal for all the actors. In fact, actors often have multiple goals. Some goals may align, for example, publishers want a game that is economically lucrative while developers want a game that is well received by critics and players. Both of these goals work together to provide players with an enjoyable game. Other times, actors’ goals directly conflict with each other, for example, hardcore players often desire games that are time intensive and challenging, while more casual gamers may desire games that are easy to use and require shorter time commitments. From this viewpoint, game development is the work of understanding the interests of a variety of actors and translating those interests so that they work together or in agreement. Inevitably, some actor’s goals are not met and they drop out of the network. Publishers may pull funding from a project, developers may move on to other games, or once the game enters the market, players may abandon it after a few hours of play, or not buy it at all. Simply put, the more actors there are working in some semblance of unison, the stronger the game network.

An example of how networks can be used to better understand games can be seen in the work of John Banks (2009). Banks’ ANT influenced ethnography of the game development company, Auran, details the creation of a game network starting with Auran enrolling players into the design and testing of a new game. Banks describes how a game network can unravel if the actors fail to work in alignment. In this case, the collapse of the network and the demise of the game arose, in part, because of the difficulties of successfully managing the interface between the professional development team and the expert gamer-testers. It proved impossible to coordinate the competing forms of expertise and interests of both developers and players (Banks, 2009). Ultimately, the players felt that their advice was not followed. Their negative accounts of the process and the game itself dissuaded other potential players from buying the game and thus joining the network. Banks’ account stands testimony to other developers and researchers as to the difficulty in aligning the interests of both players and game developers.

Following Latour, although there is no underlying hidden structure of game networks (i.e. not all game networks are constructed in the same way), there are circulating structuring templates that can lead to similarities between the networks (Latour, 2005: 196). [3] The templates relevant to control include, among many, the material techniques of governance that are built into software (e.g. semantic monitoring and surveillance software built into game servers) as well as intellectual technologies and quasi-standards such as codes and summaries of best practice (e.g. Terms of Service and End User Licensing Agreements that players must accept before entering online games). Through these templates ‘forms’ of governance are transported from site to another – both to different agents within the networks (developers, players, etc.) as well as to different networks. Thus, attention to these templates will show how certain forms of governance may be unique to some game networks, while other forms may be more widespread.

The study of how actors are made to work in agreement with each other has commonalities with governmentality research. Governmentality scholars such as Nikolas Rose (1999) highlight the role of technology in the emergence of new decentralised control strategies and the reconfiguration of old strategies. This has particular resonance in describing the novel control strategies that are appearing in games. First introduced by Michel Foucault (1991), the term ‘governmentality’ refers to the organised practices (mentalities, rationalities, and techniques) through which subjects are governed. ‘Governmentality’ is useful in analysing attempts to manage and shape conduct during the game production process and afterwards when games reach players. The broader work of Foucault has used to discuss conflict management in games and virtual worlds (MacKinnon, 1997), the ‘work’ of power gamers (Silverman and Simon, 2009), the creation of productive player populations (Kücklich, 2009), and lateral surveillance between players (Taylor, 2006b).

Governmentality scholars define their problem space in terms of ‘the conduct of conduct’. This ‘government’ includes all endeavours to ‘shape, guide, direct the conduct of others … And it also embraces the ways in which one might be urged and educated to bridle one’s own passions, to control one’s own instincts, to govern oneself’ (Rose, 1999: 3). Part of the utility of governmentality approaches is the recognition that governance is conducted not just in a hierarchical top-down manner by the nation-state but by myriad other actors in many different locales, consequently broadening the scope of study to include new spaces of governance, such as games and online spaces, and new methods of governance that are subtle and less recognisable than the overt laws, policies and regulations that have been prioritised in other studies of government. Like Latour, Rose emphasizes a detailed analysis on the micro level, examining the local context and calling attention to the ‘the small and contingent struggles, tensions and negotiations that give rise to something new and unexpected’ (Rose, 1999: 11).

Sal Humphreys (2008), in particular, applies a governmentality approach to describe the governance of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). Using ethnographic data from two large MMOGs, she describes the tactics and rationalities employed by developers and publishers that help enrol players into networked production (i.e. creating game content). Importantly, Humphreys argues that control in games is not a hierarchical top-down process and although power is held unevenly, players do have agency. The tactics of control employed by developers and publishers are met by the tactics of players. The objectives of corporate actors can often be achieved without diminishing the goals and objectives of players: ‘the exercise of power is a generative process, and the players in MMOGs are often cognisant of their own position, working both with and against publishers in strategic ways that advance their own goals’ (Humphreys, 2008: 151).

Incorporating governmentality into ANT-influenced research on games and control shifts the focus from the creation of game networks in general to the specific problem of governing these networks and the people within them in order to ensure their continued co-operation. It calls attention to the specific problems of governing these networks but also to what these specific examples can tell us about governing more generally. It directs attention to the means, actions, manners and techniques by which actors are placed under the control and guidance of others or seek to place other actors or events under their own sway. Games are ‘technologies of government’, described by Rose (1999: 52) in distinctly Latourian terms as:

An assemblage of forms of practical knowledge, with modes of perception, practices of calculation, vocabularies, types of authority, forms of judgement, architectural forms, human capacities, non-human objects and devices, inscription techniques and so forth, traversed and transected by aspirations to achieve certain outcomes in terms of the conduct of the governed … These assemblages are heterogeneous, made up of a diversity of objects and relations linked up through connections and relays of different types.

While not commonly seen in this light, recognising how games are technologies of government highlights how strategies of governance take new forms in spaces created by technology. It emphasizes how techniques to constrain and control people in these spaces may be unfamiliar in comparison to the laws or norms to which we are commonly accustomed, and draws attention to the way that technical innovations change the way we interact with each other and are consequently governed.

Returning to the question of who makes the rules in games, Latour asserts that networks do not just exist by themselves but need labour to create and maintain. Each network has ‘shepherds’ who look for ways to define the network, to mark its boundaries and render them fixed and durable (Latour, 2005: 33). In terms of games, developers take on considerable shepherding responsibilities – initially interpreting design documents and rendering the game in code, and then maintaining this code once the games enter the market. It is developers who have the closest contact with the formal rule structures and algorithms that underlie the game network. While developers directly govern the game code, they themselves are subject to considerable governance pressures. They are configured by the technology they use (in terms of software limitations, pre-existing game engines, and platform constraints), and governed by their position within the game industry. For example, while developers have some freedom in determining how they program a game, the shape and direction of the game is dictated to them by designers as well as publishers (of course, developers are also influenced by workplace structure, organisational hierarchies, programmer culture, individual personalities, political economics, etc.).

The focus on developers is important because they are the nexus between coded control and people. While creating and maintaining the technical structure of game networks is commonly recognised as the developer’s domain (and particularly, the programmer’s domain), developers do considerable work to guide and constrain other humans in the network. This latter work is not commonly recognised nor researched. There is some acknowledgement that game technologies shape the way we behave – Lawrence Lessig (1999) argues that computer code can work to constrain behaviour and Pippin Barr (2008) highlights how players are informed of preferable conduct during games – but there is little examination of the process of designing these aspects into games, and scant focus on the people responsible for creating the code beyond the autobiographical works written by a handful of well-known designers (Morningstar and Farmer, 1991; Bartle, 2007; Koster, 2002; Curtis, 1992).

Playing with the Rules

Governmentality studies and ANT together direct the researcher to look at the vehicles, tools, instruments and materials that give form to and provide stability for the game network. They focus our gaze on how the game is “held” together, despite the myriad components that compose its network and the constant pulling and pushing in different directions from actors with different purposes and goals. Holding the game network together is made more difficult by the very nature of the technology. There is no singular “original” object, even as a prototype. Rather, the game exists ‘simultaneously in a multitude of copies and a plenitude of physical places (computer screens) simultaneously’ (Wittel et al, 2002: 193). Once in mass production, there are millions of copies of a game – copies that may be altered and modified, shared or forgotten. Consequently, there is a struggle to define the “real” and legitimate version of the game, and to define the way it should be acquired (e.g. by purchase rather than illegal download) played (e.g. by following the game’s written and implicit rules) and won (e.g. by avoiding cheating) (Consalvo, 2007). This struggle takes renewed fervour when deviant or anti-social behaviour takes place within in the game, as well as when issues of content ownership, intellectual property rights and taxation come into question (Burke, 2004; Humphreys, 2007; Reynolds, 2007; Whitson and Doyle, 2008).

The potential instability of the game network is partly attributable to the technology it is built with. Digital games, argue Salen and Zimmerman, are a fertile ground for rule-breaking because the code of the game is plastic and pliable and their automation leaves gaps for hacking into the system via cheat codes, workarounds, or more intricate code-breaking. The anonymous nature of games and the lack of face-to-face interaction additionally encourage rule breaking (Salen and Zimmerman, 2003; Williams, 2006).

While the technology within the game network enables behaviours deemed problematic by game developers, it is also a key element in governance. As argued by Matthew Williams (2006), governing game spaces through technological means is advantageous in that it forces errant players to renegotiate their paths and goals and imposes constraints on players that are more pervasive and immediate than other modes of regulation such as written rules. Technology is malleable and easily shaped by those actors – such as developers – that have access to its control and it is more readily adaptable than laws, norms or markets. In addition, it allows developers to prevent both criminal and deviant behaviour, instead of attempting to respond reactively. Finally, technological constraints, Williams (2006: 147) argues, are a familiar form of regulation that are less contentious to players than other modes such as written rules.

The utility of governing subjects through technology is nothing new (Deleuze, 1992; Jones, 2000). But what is new is how this governance links to rationalities of play and the shaping of emergent behaviours. [4] The very nature of ‘games’ and ‘play’ encourage testing, bending, and even breaking the rules. Playing a game necessitates learning the rules and testing their boundaries (e.g. how high can I jump? Who / what can I shoot? etc.), while winning requires mastery of the rules (Koster, 2005), and in some case bending (e.g. exploits) or breaking them (e.g. mods or cheats) in order to win. Players consciously decide to play with the rules and structure of the game (Sotamaa, 2009:82). Mastering, beating, and even subverting rules is a part of “play”. For example, Salen and Zimmerman define play as ‘free movement within a more rigid structure’ (2003:304). This definition traces its roots back to Huizinga and Caillois who both argue that play exists within the limits of rules (Huizinga, 1938/1955; Caillois 1958/1961). Using the example of the “play” of a car’s steering wheel, Salen and Zimmerman argue that play is made possible by rules and rigid structures. In other words, the play of the wheel is only made possible by the rigid structures of the steering column and axles, while gameplay is only made possible by the rigid structures of the rules. Because by nature a game has room for the movement of play, it is ‘always possible for players to drive a wedge into the system, bending it and transforming it into a new shape’ (Salen and Zimmerman, 2003:565). Accordingly, the study of control in games is made more complex by the fact that rules cannot prevent all undesirable behaviours. Rules cannot equate to control as they must allow for some freedom of movement. While rules are closely tied with control, this control is imperfect. This is due to the nature of rules themselves, as well as the specific contexts of rules in games. In terms of the former, Ludwig Wittgenstein, extending Hume’s problem of induction, argues that no course of action can be determined by a rule, because any course of action can be made out to accord with the rule (Wittgenstein, 1953/2003). In other words, the applicability of rules depends on how each person interprets them. Rules do not contain the rules for their own applicability, and rules for interpreting rules provide no help as they themselves can be interpreted in different ways. Wittgenstein understands rules not as formulas standing apart from their application, but as constituted by their application. Thus, rules cannot determine behaviour because there is always room for interpretation on the part of the players following rules.

Even in technological spaces where rules are embedded in code, there are frequent cases of ambiguity, instability, and novelty that do not fit neatly into the categories set out by formal rules. In game studies, the most common examples of this are exploits and loopholes that allow players to subvert obstacles without ever breaking the written or coded game rules. The way rules are interpreted and invoked change from context to context. This helps explain the mangle of practice, in which technology fails to behave similarly in different situations (i.e. how the game is used by players can diverge greatly from its intended use by developers, as well as differs according to the specific local contexts of players) (Steinkuehler, 2006).

Even if the rules of games were concise and knowable, the behaviour of those rules set into motion creates patterns and results not contained within the rules themselves (Salen and Zimmerman, 2003:160). Games are ‘emergent systems’ that use a limited set of rules to generate unpredictable patterns of complexity. [5] These unpredictable patterns create surprises within gameplay and contribute to a game’s replayability. ‘Emergent game play’ is characterised by players interacting with the game environment and other players in ways not originally planned by the game designers (Smith, 2001). It is not possible for developers to predict all the ways the rules will play out. In fact, developers must work to promote some amount unpredictable behaviour:

Too much structure and a game is overdetermined: there is not enough uncertainty or freedom for players. Too little structure and the game turns chaotic: there is too much uncertainty, too much freedom, and no sense of how the player’s decisions should proceed from one moment to the next (Salen and Zimmerman, 2003:199).

Examples of emergent behaviour include using digital games to create ‘machinima’ – short films made using game’s rendering engines – the growth of currency trading in MMOGs, and the prevalence of pay-for-sex services in virtual worlds. Governance of emergent systems is complex in that action comes from the bottom up, and as such it resists being planned, orchestrated, or controlled by a hierarchical ‘higher’ power (Kelly, 1994).

Due to the growth in end-user programming and user-created content, as well as the growth of real world economies within game spaces and the potential for real world crimes, developers take on a larger role in governing human behaviour, and in doing so, are showing how people may be governed in technological spaces more generally, not just in games. Developers face inherent difficulties in controlling emergent and rule-breaking behaviour, as well as the various pressures not to control them. Developers, and the larger nexus of designers, game development companies and publishers, must maintain a fine balance between freedom and control in games: encourage increased creativity and emergent behaviour in game play while at the same time increasing player regulation to ensure that this behaviour is channelled in certain directions only. Ultimately, developers are engaged in boundary work: defining how the game is to be played and the ways in which the ‘real world’ can intrude into game play, if at all.

This emphasis on boundary work, I argue, is largely a new development. Traditionally games had more constrained forms of interaction and playability and were largely stabilised after their release to the public in their ‘final’ form. What composed the game, its rules, its coding, how it was played, and how to win or lose generally remained stable. However, emergent game crafting and modifications are now more popular (Taylor, 2006a). This destabilizes the game, re-opening it to examination and questioning of how it works, and consequently exposing the network to modification and disruption as well as potential growth. The growth of economic opportunities in games has only exacerbated this disruption – the promise of ‘real world’ income to be earned entices players to enter and stay in the network, but it also gives them incentive to attempt to alter it in order to make it work more in their favour (Dibbell, 2006).

Maintaining the fine balance between creativity and constraint, emergent play and control has become necessary for the game industry as a whole. Games that are stable and unchanging often lack replayability and are abandoned after being played through once or twice, remaining on store shelves for an average of six months. Given production costs that can reach one hundred million dollars U.S. and multi-year development schedules for mainstream games, game developers are looking for ways to extend this shelf life. Opening the game up to end-user modification and development is one way to achieve this as users can create and share new game objects, levels, challenges and strategies and in doing so, create vibrant communities to support the game (Kücklich, 2005). Opening up the black box of the game code, however, may put the game itself at risk. For example, open access to the source code of the game may enable attempts to crash game servers, erase game content, and ruin the game for other players. Furthermore, opening the game to end-user development has numerous drawbacks in terms spawning legal battles over who owns the created content and disputes over acceptable alterations to the original game (Humphreys, 2005, 2007; Kücklich, 2005; Terranova, 2000; Whitson and Doyle, 2008).

Constance Steinkhueler (2006) describes a ‘mangle of play’, where the game that is played by users is not the game that developers originally had in mind, but is rather the outcome of a ‘mangle’ of production and consumption, human intentions (of both developers and players), material constraints and affordances, broader social norms, cultural practices, and even chance. Developers and designers have an imagined user in mind during the design process, as well as an template for how the technology will be used (Woolgar, 1991). While it is important to consider who developers picture using their games, what they hope users will do with the technology, and what they hope that users will not do (Taylor, 2003a), developers cannot predict how their technology will be used, and by who. Developers, and the larger game development industry, are increasingly aware of the unpredictability of how their designs and rules will be taken up by the groups they are designing for (and attempting to regulate) (Steinkuehler, 2006).

The difference between other software and games, and the increasing mangle of play and unpredictability in how games are taken up and re-inscribed is especially apparent in online games that promote the creation of content. Virtual worlds such Second Life (Linden Lab, 2003) rely almost exclusively on users for their content. In order to participate in guilds and reach the higher levels of online games such as World of WarCraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004), players must download and use mods created not by game designers, but by the gaming community itself (Taylor, 2006). Users are conceptualised in a much different way. They are not sold a finished end product, but are enlisted in the actual process of design and development (Humphreys, 2005; Malaby, 2006). Players are increasingly central productive agents in game culture and thus more progressive models are needed for understanding and visualising the development process. There is a distinction between the emergent crafting that is now being encouraged (e.g. adding game content, modding, generating maps and walkthroughs, and creating fan communities and web sites), and the more conscious intent of traditional software design. There has always been a difference in design between games and other software, but there is a now a growing divergence between the emergent design of many games and more traditional games that have more constrained forms of interaction and playability.

While participatory design requires updated frameworks for understanding the developer / player relationship, it does not mean that developers should no longer be an object of study. In fact, it is increasingly important to look at how developers anticipate and shape the relationship between players and themselves. While developers cannot predict with complete confidence how the game is played – as the collective effort of users results in unexpected social patterns and phenomena – developers do considerable work in attempting to account for increasingly diverse social contexts of use and in doing so to govern the actions of users.

Employing ANT and Governmentality Studies in Game Research

Games that rely on the ‘mangle of play’ between developers and players are still shaped by tools, menus, commands, and windows, all consciously designed by game owners, administrators and open-source contributors and implemented by developers (Malaby, 2006). In light of the increasing role that players have in building onto and modifying this architecture, and the blurring boundaries between developer and player, developers, even more than before, have to anticipate probable contexts of use and design for these. They articulate constraints on the appropriate contexts of a system’s use, and are increasingly cognizant of the fact that they are responsible for problems (be it technological or social) that emerge with the design. Accordingly, research focusing on the role of developers is needed more than ever. Both ANT and governmentality studies suggest potential methods for revealing the role of game developers in controlling game networks.

Ethnography is the clearest way to examine the role of developers in holding game networks together. While few governmentality scholars utilise ethnography, it defines ANT research. This method includes participant observation, but also the gathering of further data through document collection and interviews, especially on issues that are unclear or not directly observable (Bryman and Teevan, 2005). Thomas Malaby (2009) provides a notable example of how ethnography may be employed to explore how the rationalities of game developers influence the design and governance of virtual worlds and games. Extending over a year-long period, Malaby observed the development process at Linden Lab (creators of Second Life), including face-to-face participant observation and interviews. His analysis incorporates details of the developers’ physical work environment, their interactions with other employees, and the software tools developers used and created (including bug tracking and communication tools). Additionally, Malaby supplemented his observational data with a wiki where Linden employees could add information of their own, and spent a considerable amount of time in Second Life itself.

In relation to issues of governmentality and control, Malaby found that the developers of Second Life were influenced by ‘technoliberal’ rationalities that emphasize the importance of freedom, emergence, and individual creation along with an aversion to hierarchical authority. This, in turn, influences how the virtual world is designed, the affordances allowed to players, and the operation of control within the world:

This practice of architecture embraces an approach to control that trades the promise of total order for a different ethical position, one that attempts, imperfectly, to reject top-down decision-making in favor of embracing the indeterminate outcomes of social complexities (Malaby, 2009:8).

In Malaby’s case study, control is largely embedded in digital architecture instead of being vested in human authorities, bureaucratic processes, and legalistic conventions. Relating to the content production tools created by developers for both other employees as well as players, this embedded control occurs on two levels: technological constraints on how other Linden employees are allowed to alter the virtual world, and technological constraints on what players are allowed to do with content production tools. Ultimately, Malaby found that developers – those who have the ability to create scripting tools and not just use them – are vested with considerable authority and control.

While governmentality studies help illustrate the complexity of control in games, the majority of these studies concentrate on a fragment of the game network, mainly human actors (developers, designers, publishers, and players), the promotion of economic production, and the relationship between law, language, and code. Beyond general references to code, the technological underpinnings of the game network are largely ignored. Stephano De Paoli and Aphra Kerr (2009), utilising the notion of a ‘cheating assemblage’, emphasize how our understanding of concepts such as cheating can be enriched by focusing on the assemblage of both human and non-human actors. Like most other work on cheating (see Consalvo, 2007), they incorporate an analysis of player actions and legal documents such as EULAs, but they take a multi-level approach that also includes a discussion of the highly sophisticated technological elements that shape practices of cheating. In doing so, De Paoli and Kerr (2009: 4) emphasize how digital architectures of control actually work. For example, they describe how the master-slave architecture used in MMOGs is utilised to prevent cheating:

[This architecture] consists of a centralized server with several clients (the players’ machines) connected to it. In this set-up the communication between clients involves a client sending a request to the server, the server validating, or not, the request, and then the server sending the request to all other target clients. One of the main reasons why this architecture is preferred is because by storing large part of the game execution on the server, it is possible to keep the gaming activities under control … In addition, because the server must validate all the moves/requests made by the clients, it can also deny certain actions.

This multi-level approach helps overcome the game studies focus on players and player actions as well as the computer science and technical literature focus on technical solutions to control. Both case studies (De Paoli and Kerr, 2009; Malaby, 2009) use ethnographic data and a close attention to technical detail to advance our understanding of how games are governed, and provide methodological templates for future research on control in games. Before concluding, I will now discuss some of the larger implications and complexities of studying control in games, and draw a few preliminary analogies between games and other situations that are geared towards encouraging innovation and emergent behaviour.

The Complexities Inherent to Governing Play

Returning once again to governmentality studies, governance projects are rooted in the creation of subjects with certain mindsets and rationalities. A large part of governance lies in the creation of metaphors and concepts for structuring how people behave. For example, neo-liberal subjects are governed through the concept of “freedom”. This freedom is contingent upon subjects agreeing to the constraint of law and shouldering certain responsibilities and behaving in certain ways (Rose, 1999). As long as subjects follow the rules, they are “free” to do whatever they want. [6] Rationalities of “play” bring a new dynamic to the governance project that is different than that of “freedom”, as games and play encourage subjects whose rationalities are based not on following rules, but on exploring, testing, and bending them. Moreover, the rationalities of play – in terms of operating between, above, or beyond the rules – are, in turn, leaking into the “real world” (Dibbell, 2006; Yee, 2006).

While certainly not the only rationality at stake in terms of rule-breaking, it is important to examine how concepts of play may inform rule-breaking in games and other technological spaces. The concepts associated with play – such as the emphasis placed on winning, the mastery and prodding of technological systems until success is achieved, and the view that digital spaces are ideal for experimenting with conflict, risk, and danger without physical consequences (Crawford, 1982; Dibbell, 2008; Turkle, 1995) – have parallels to other non-game sites (e.g. the hacking of corporate websites and the “cat and mouse” chase between the entertainment industries and illegal download sites both exhibit rationalities of play). The ways players are enrolled as co-producers of game content are often congruent to how internet users are enrolled in collaboration and user-centered design (commonly referred to in reference to ‘Web 2.0’). These situations are often geared towards encouraging innovation rather than stifling it, and therefore, as in games, governance may be coloured by some ambivalence about rule breaking. In addition, there are clear parallels between digital game spaces, online virtual worlds, and to online spaces in general, in that they all are automated socio-technical environments constructed by code with implicit and explicit rules for their operation (Lianos and Douglas, 2000). Entrance to these spaces is largely contingent on agreeing to abide by the terms of service. Accordingly, there are similarities in terms of how these places may be governed.

While there are limits to the analogy between games and other situations, examining how governance in these contexts is similar to and different from governance in other locales promises to be theoretically fruitful. Accordingly, these parallels are why the study of games and the creation of forms of governance that attempt to curb or even harness the rationalities of play are important to fields outside of game studies.

In the past, governance methods have been imported into games from the real world – such as the use of written contracts to regulate players – the inadequacies of these methods are exemplified in numerous lawsuits launched by players against game companies such as Blizzard Entertainment and Linden Labs (Dibbell, 2006; Fairfield, 2007; Whitson and Doyle, 2008). Accordingly, it is likely that this exchange of methods may soon flow in the opposite direction, and that governance methods propagated in games spaces that harness the rationalities of play may be imported to other technological spaces and the ‘real world’. Even if they are not imported directly from the game world, it is likely that analogous methods may develop in comparable situations in other realms. Already, in terms of regulating user created content, developers and game development companies are tasked with the feat of producing ‘citizens’ that are productive yet law abiding. It is not surprising that the lessons learned by developers may translate to governance projects outside of game spaces. Research must pay more attention to the governance techniques developing in games, as once this governance infrastructure is established and translated to other networks beyond games, they may be enduring and resistant to change (Jackson et al., 2007). Showing properties referred to by historians as “momentum”, “trajectories”, or “path dependencies”, these infrastructures become established in our technology and social imaginings and tend to continue in particular directions, making reversals or changes to alternative approaches costly, difficult, or even impossible.

Governance within game networks resists simplification. It is not simply a case of profit-seeking game companies attempting to capitalise from the labour of players-as-producers. Nor is it a simply case of devious players looking to ruin the game for others, or to make a quick buck. In both cases, the actors are simply attempting to mould the network to fit their needs and desires. And in both cases, the multiple layers of rules that give the network its form are under constant revision, modification, and change. Rather than trying to force the complexities of governance to fit into a single framework of domination, future research needs to highlight the pulling and pushing of different actors and the intricate balancing act that ensures the game networks’ survival. Ultimately, this research examines the way in which people are governed in rule-based systems. This governance is inextricable with rationalities of play. As argued by Ollie Sotamaa (2009: 70) ‘this two-fold nature, on the one hand acting under the authority of the restrictive game rules and on the other hand capable of performing actions that go beyond the rules or even playing with the rules, is essential to our understanding of the player’. I extend Sotamaa’s argument even further and argue that the ways in which people learn rules as well as learn to push against and alter them has importance to the study of governance in many technological environments beyond games.

Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that more attention should be paid to the role of game development processes in establishing systems of governance. In particular, I have highlighted the need to focus on both game developers and the technical elements they employ in creating digital architectures control. I believe that both ANT and govermentality studies are useful tools for better conceptualising control in games, and have further argued that the ‘network’ is an important way for grasping how a game is governed as well as for more fully understanding control and counterplay. I posit that, in order to understand control in games, it is also vital to understand how the concept of ‘play’ interacts with both rules and control. A common element of play includes re-making and breaking rules. Play increasingly involves emergent behaviour, including networked production on the behalf of players. Following this, game networks can be both destabilised and revitalised by player behaviours that are unanticipated by developers and designers. Accordingly, the work of game development increasingly includes predicting and governing human behaviour through both technical and social means, and, as such, is an important avenue for further study. Finally, I have drawn some analogies between games and other situations that, similar to games, are geared towards encouraging innovation rather than stifling it, and thus are ambivalent to some forms of rule-breaking. Ultimately, I argue that a better understanding of how control operates in games is important in itself, but also has much to tell us about how systems of control may operate in other technological spaces.

Notes

[1] Because ANT has gone through numerous growth phases and transformations since the early 1980’s, when it was first articulated by scholars such as Bruno Latour (1988), Michel Callon (1986), and John Law (1986), it is necessary to clarify that this description of ANT is taken from Latour’s Reassembling the Social (2005). I caution readers that I am using ANT as a general analytical tool with which to conceptualise the production and maintenance of games. While a more nuanced overview of ANT is preferable, it is outside of the scope this article.

[2] Latour uses the terms “actor” and “actant” as a placeholder to denote what – human or non-human – acts or shifts actions. The source of action lies not in the actor themselves, but rather the myriad attachments in the network.

[3] One of the clearest templates is that of genre, which draws from media studies traditions to provide a means of talking about production pathways as well as the management of player expectations. A discussion of the role of genre is beyond the scope of this paper, although it is a fruitful avenue for further research.

[4] Following a governmentality approach, I use terminology such as “rationalities” similarly to how game scholars use “rhetoric”. “Rhetoric” is a discourse, narrative and argument for how the game world works. It provides the player with implicit instructions on how they should act in the game, and points to potential methods and techniques for playing and winning the game (Bogost, 2007: Sutton-Smith, 1997). I am arguing here that mastery, testing, and bending the rules is a rhetoric that underlies gaming.

[5] Juul (2002) refers to emergence in games in order to differentiate “open” games (where simple rules combine, leading to variation in gameplay) from “closed” games (where serially introduced challenges lead to linear gameplay). While helpful for classification purposes, I take a different approach than Juul and argue that emergent behaviour takes place even in linear “closed” games. For example, the creation of player mods, cheats, and machinima occurs in linear closed games as well as open games. Additionally, while emergent behaviour is more likely in multiplayer games due to the wide range of player to player interactions, it can also take place in single player games.

[6] In some ways, there is a direct correlation between “freedom” and “play”. As made clear by Roger Caillois (1961), within a game a player is ‘free within the limits set by the rules’ (as cited by Salen and Zimmerman, 2003: 310). Play, just like the freedom described in Rose’s (1999) genealogy emerges both because of and in opposition to more rigid structures.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editors and my anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Any errors or omissions in this article are solely mine.

Author’s Biography

Jennifer R. Whitson is a Sociology PhD candidate at Carleton University. Her current research interests include digital identity management, governance in online domains, and social influences on software development processes. Her most recent work includes a feature article in the March/April 2009 edition of Interactions magazine, a chapter on virtual world governance, co-authored with Aaron Doyle, in Stéphane Leman-Langlois’ edited collection, Technocrime, and an article on identity theft, co-authored with Kevin Haggerty, in the November 2008 issue of Economy & Society.

Email:  jwhitson at connect.carleton.ca

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Aphra Kerr, National University of Ireland Maynooth

In this paper we ask the question, how can we define cheating in Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs)? It is important to clarify immediately that what is at stake here is the way we study the phenomenon of cheating, how we conceptualise it and how we research it in MMORPGs. In particular, the focus is the difference between defining, or reducing, a phenomenon to its essential traits as opposed to defining it on the basis of the process that has generated it (see for discussions Latour, 1987 and 2005; Lash, 2002; DeLanda, 2002 and 2006). The rationale behind the opening research question is that much of the literature has defined cheating in online games via a restricted set of essential traits: in particular, as the player(s) actions that modify the game to obtain unfair advantages over other players. On the contrary, we propose that cheating should be conceptualised as what unfolds – the result(s) – from the empirical interrelations of several elements that compose MMORPGs, and not just from player behaviour. We provide a new perspective on cheating in MMORPGs, which suggests that cheating is the result of a dynamic process and interrelations between a range of elements.

In this paper, we study cheating by using the concept of assemblage as proposed by DeLanda (2002 and 2006), following Deleuze and Guattari (1987). This concept takes a realist stance emphasising that social and natural phenomena should be conceptualised as the dynamic result of the empirical and historical relations among empirical elements, rather than thorough listing their essential traits or making timeless classifications. In this paper we analyse the following elements of MMORPGs and their relationships (but we are aware that the list is not necessarily conclusive): the game architecture, the game code and the game legal documents. Moreover, we focus on how these elements are interleaved with players, games companies and also companies offering cheating solutions. For us, cheating in MMORPGs possesses a mobile and permeable boundary where these different elements, and the players and companies strategies embedded in them, compete and / or cooperate – always in some form of relations with each other – in the process of stabilising or destabilising what is cheating in MMORPGs. We support this proposition by mainly providing empirical examples from ongoing research of the online game Tibia (http://www.tibia.com), a 2D, medieval fantasy MMORPG developed and distributed by CipSoft, since 1997. Tibia has an estimated 300,000 players and is played on more than 70 servers in Germany and the USA.

The assemblage approach seeks also to specify what is defined as the structure of spaces of possibilities (DeLanda, 2002): a differentiation between what is possible in principle in an assemblage (the virtual) and which of these possibilities is really actualised. [1] In our search for a theoretical resource that captures the empirical and sociotechnical negotiations and struggles for control around cheating in MMORPGs the concept of assemblage has proved to be a key resource. We believe that by embracing this concept we will be able to unveil the dynamics that are unleashed by the virtual/actual articulation of cheating in MMORPGs.

We are convinced that a more complete understanding of the processual nature of cheating in MMORPGs as assemblage is useful not only in itself, but also for our understanding of other related concepts like ‘counterplay’ and ‘transgressive play’ (Aarseth, 2007). In particular, we discuss the concept of counterplay – which is at the centre of this special issue – and link it with the virtual and actual aspects characterising cheating in MMORPGs as assemblage. The concept of counterplay suggests we think about play as negotiated power relations exercised by the materiality of software and a range of other artifacts. In our conceptualisation of cheating we attempt to explore the range of artifacts and actors involved in MMORPGs as assemblage and the continual renegotiation of the assemblage interrelations.

This paper is organised as follows: firstly, we briefly describe MMORPGs; secondly, we describe the importance of studying cheating and criticise the mainstream definitions of cheating in MMORPGs; thirdly, we describe our approach based on the concept of assemblage; fourthly, we provide some examples of cheating as the result of the MMORPG’s assemblage; fifthly, we discuss our contribution to the concept of ‘counterplay’. In the conclusion, we provide a new definition of cheating in MMORPGs based on our findings.

MMORPGs in a Nutshell

MMORPGs are a successful sub-sector of the digital games industry [2] whereby players participate in a persistent virtual world (Bell, 2009) that requires continuous customer support from the game developer (Kerr, 2006). MMORPGs are sophisticated technological systems, that in most cases use a client-server architecture (see figure 3) and rely upon complex computer code. MMORPGs are also ‘deeply social’ worlds (Castronova, 2005; Taylor, 2006) where millions of players cooperate, compete and trade online.

MMORPGs have a number of specific characteristics. Firstly, an MMORPG is considered persistent because it is an online world that continues to function even after individual players have logged out and stopped participating. This is different from traditional digital games played by a single person or small groups, whereby the game ceases to function after the player(s) has logged out.

Secondly, in MMORPGs players usually assume a fictional role. For example in Tibia, players are allowed to choose between four different roles (Knight, Paladin, Sorcerer or Druid) all of which allow different types of gameplay. A character’s role determines her characteristics in many ways and different roles allow different types of gameplay, of attack and combat with both monsters and other characters. Knights for instance have particular abilities with melee weapons (such as swords or axes) and, therefore, are strong in close combats. By comparison, Druids are better at casting spells and healing.

A third characteristic relates to the advancements that are obtained by players. In Tibia, one of the main activities carried on by players is that of killing monsters. There are several different types of monsters in Tibia, [3] by killing these monsters players can increase their level / experience points and in so doing increase their overall game ranking. Moreover, monsters often carry items such as gold pieces or weapons that can be looted by players.

Figure 1: Tibia screenshot that shows an avatar (Talah Teon) engaging in combat with monsters (Slimes). We also see the game interface, with the character’s items on the right. The overall level/ranking of this character (Level 56) is at the bottom right. From http://www.tibia.com/abouttibia/?subtopic=screenshots&screenshot=cathedral

Finally, solving quests either alone or in teams of players is also a common activity in MMORPGs such as Tibia. In Tibia, the successful completion of quests provides players with special items such as magic weapons or amulets. In many MMORPGs, players can organise themselves into guilds: groups that share the same goals. For example, in Tibia, players can form guilds and take part in wars between guilds. The rewards for winning guild wars in Tibia lie in the ability to exercise forms of domination over a server.

Defining Cheating: This is the Problem

Several studies have pointed out that the complex social and technical nature of MMORPGs makes these games potentially open to a range of disruptive practices (see for an overview ENISA, 2008), that include fraud (Bardzell et al., 2007), harassment (Foo and Koivisto, 2004), or social conflicts (Smith, 2004). In our research, we are particularly interested in the practices and consequences of cheating in MMORPGs and for virtual environments more generally. Specifically, this paper has emerged from an interdisciplinary research project, composed of computer scientists and social scientists, that focuses on the design of services and applications for the Future Internet. Our research on cheating aims to contribute an in-depth understanding of the social intricacies of cheating in MMORPGs in particular, and social behaviour in online environments in general.

Understanding cheating practices is of paramount importance for understanding online gaming practices (Consalvo, 2007). Indeed, cheating in a MMORPG is a highly controversial phenomenon that deserves attention, insofar as it is perceived by the developers, publishers and many players to be a threat to the social experience and economic viability of a game. For others, cheating can be justified because it offers the potential to generate large amounts of real and virtual money, or to more easily progress up in the game rankings.

Any new study of cheating in MMORPGs must critically engage with the mainstream definitions of cheating. In particular, there are two main bodies of literature on cheating in digital and online games: the technical / computer science literature (for example Yan and Randell, 2005) and the media / game studies literature (for example Consalvo, 2007). Elsewhere (De Paoli and Kerr, 2010) we have described how the first type of literature focuses mostly on cheating as an outcome of poor security design, whereas the second emphasises mostly the cultural aspects and the idea that cheating is often proof of player power. Although these two types of literature possess clearly different goals and methods, both often share a common definition of cheating.

We can see this by reading some mainstream definitions of cheating in digital and online games. For instance, Salen and Zimmerman (2003) in their work on the design of digital games argue that ‘the cheater surreptitiously takes actions that are not proscribed by the rules, in order to gain an advantage’ According to Parker (2007: 2) in his work on cheating in videogames, ‘we can agree that a cheater cheats in order to have a better chance of achieving their goals whatever they are’. Brooke et al. (2004) in their work on the definition of healthy “Virtual Societies” argue that cheating can be defined as ‘gaining some unfair advantage over other participants’. Smith (2004: 5) in his work on the social conflicts in online multiplayer games argues that ‘behavior labeled as cheating typically gives the cheater an unfair advantage over opponents and/or runs contrary to the spirit of the game’. And the list of publications sharing similar definitions of cheating can easily go on (for example Yan and Choi, 2002 or Webb and Soh, 2007).

If, for a moment, we leave aside the few existing exceptions to this debate (see the section Discussion) [4], we can easily conclude from these examples of cheating definitions that most of the existing literature defines cheating as a practice where someone obtains unfair advantages. This is the fundamental trait of cheating, without which this phenomenon would not be what it is: obtaining an unfair advantage over other players is the “essential trait” of cheating activities. In other words, if unfair advantages over other players are not obtained by doing certain activities, then what we have is not cheating, but something else.

We are aware that, especially in media studies the debate on cheating revolves around the controversial nature of this phenomenon. [5] For example, the work by Consalvo (2007), clearly points out that the definition of cheating is something that gets culturally negotiated by players, cheaters and the anti-cheating industry. However, Consalvo’s book also strongly supports an understanding of cheating in terms of “unfair advantages”: for instance the whole of chapter 4 and the conclusions in chapter 7 discuss how players negotiate the meaning of cheating as “obtaining unfair advantages”.

It is also worth nothing that the literature providing classifications and typologies of cheating (for example Yan and Randell, 2005; Webb and Soh, 2007) also possesses an essentialist view, insofar cheating is characterised by listing in timeless classifications the various types of cheating exploits and motivations to cheat. In MMORPGs, this includes using software that tampers with the game client, the exploitation of design flaws and game bugs and even social engineering.

The Essential Traits of Cheating

The words “essential traits” play a crucial role in this discussion. Indeed, we believe that mainstream definitions of cheating convey an essentialist view in which what constitutes or does not constitute cheating is defined in advance. If we adopt this definition of cheating, we already possess a causal explanation or interpretation about cheating in MMORPGs that prefigures the empirical dynamics thorough which this phenomenon unfolds. Indeed, we already know, even before we do our empirical research, what we are looking for: all the elements that give unfair advantages to players and perhaps the motivations that induce players to cheat. Contrary to current definitions / classifications that only focus on a limited set of essential traits of cheating, we propose to focus on the interrelation processes among the elements of MMORPGs from which cheating unfolds, in order to go beyond the definition of cheating as what provides “unfair advantages”.

At this point, we want introduce an example that will allow us to rethink the definition of cheating, and in so doing illustrate some of the limits of essentialist definitions and also elaborate on the productive contribution of our approach. In particular, we adopt a strategy which is common in the sub-discipline of Science and Technology Studies (STS), in which didactic empirical examples are used to illustrate complex theoretical issues and concepts (some relevant examples are in Latour, 1991 and 1992). The example we provide here relates to the direct experience of one of the authors.

The Trentino region, in the north part of Italy, is an area characterised by an alpine environment with relatively high mountains and a wide distribution of forests. In the Trentino territory, there are several naturally formed alpine lakes that are populated by wild trout. In these lakes, fishermen can fish recreationally if they posses their own fishing equipment such as the fishing rod, the hooks, the fishing reel with the fishing line and so on. Moreover, fishermen must possess a local fishing license that gives them the right to fish. The existence of fishing licenses implies the fishermen’s acceptance of specific regulations. Indeed, fishermen must abide by the rules that are set by the local fishing authority to regulate fishing activities. There are, of course, several different rules with different purposes such as the rule that sets the maximum daily catch at 6 trout, or the rule that sets the minimum length in centimeters for keeping a trout. Fishermen that are caught violating the rules (e.g. with more than 6 trout) will incur a fine and a temporary ban from fishing.

An interesting rule for fishing in natural lakes in Trentino says that it is possible to fish only by using natural baits, for example, worms or insects. Thus it is forbidden to use artificial baits, often referred to as fishing lure (see figure 2 for some examples). [6] What is more important, however, is that among fishermen it is common knowledge that trout are keenly attracted by the colors and the movements of these artificial baits when they are used in lakes. Therefore, catching fish by using artificial baits is certainly easier compared to the use of natural baits that by contrast require more time and are less attractive for trout. While most fishermen certainly abide by the fishing rules, this is not always the case. Indeed, some fishermen use artificial baits anyway, hence violating the rules. Those fishermen that use artificial baits in natural alpine lakes not only violate the local fishing rules, they also obtain what we can recognise as an unfair advantage over other fishermen and perhaps over the fish as well.

Figure 2: Example of artificial baits, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plugs_(fishing)

Rethinking Cheating

The fishing example supports the proposition about the limits of defining cheating on the basis of some “essential traits” and, in particular, as “obtaining unfair advantages over other players”. If we apply this definition to the fishing example, we can easily decide that the action that brings an unfair advantage to the fishermen is that of using the fishing lure. At this point, we might explore the reasons why a fisherman uses the fishing lure to violate the regulation, or list the characteristics of the lure and why they are unfair (as in media studies). Or we might argue for more guards and other forms of control in order to detect and punish those fishermen that use the lures (as in computer science). But it is clear that according to mainstream definitions of cheating we do not need to take into account all those things that do not necessarily bring unfair advantages to cheating fishermen. For example, the use of the fishing rod is common to cheating and non-cheating fishermen, so using the fishing equipment (the rod, the reel with the line and so on) in general does not bring an unfair advantage and, therefore, falls outside the definition of cheating. The same can be said for the lakes and the trout, as these do not change from cheating fishermen to fair fishermen. Why should we take into account the lake if the problem is, for example, preventing the use of the lure? What does the lake add to the motivations of using the lure rather than natural baits?

We think that it is exactly here that there is a problem with current cheating definitions and classifications. Understanding cheating just as “what brings unfair advantages” might be limited for our empirical and theoretical investigations. On the contrary, adopting an approach that focuses on the process of cheating, allows us to include in our investigations and discussions more elements and their inter-relational dynamics. For example, one cannot use the artificial bait without using the fishing rod, and certainly it does not make sense to use it without the lake and fish. Here, some of the limits with current cheating definitions have become clear: we cannot isolate the essential traits of cheating (i.e. what brings unfair advantages and the motivations behind the use of these elements) from everything else as it is the interrelations among things that is important (the artificial baits, the rod, the lakes, the trout, the fishermen, the regulations and the guards), even if each single element does not specifically provide unfair advantages. By defining cheating as what gives unfair advantages we risk investigating just a small fraction of the problem (the artificial bait) leaving outside all the remaining elements (the lake, the fishing equipment and so on) and more important their interrelations. Hence, we think that cheating in MMORPGs should be seen as the final outcome that unfolds from the relations among the various elements and include especially those elements which do not directly account for the unfair advantages. The issue now is to attempt to investigate cheating in MMORPGs by applying this conceptual approach.

Assemblage Theory

The artificial bait example provides us with a new way of approaching cheating. There are at least two elements that we need to take into account: first that conceptualising cheating requires a non-essentialist approach (for example we cannot reduce cheating to just an analysis of the artificial baits) and second we need a concept that can grasp the relations among the various elements and what unfolds from these relations (cheating is one of the outcomes of the interrelation among elements – the lake, the fishermen, the equipment and so on – even if they do not bring unfair advantages). A good candidate for solving at once these two problems is the approach known as assemblage theory (DeLanda, 2002 and 2006). [7]

According to DeLanda (2006) the concept of assemblage allows us to think about the relations between a whole and its parts. For example, recreational fishing can be seen as a whole composed of different parts, including the fishermen, the trout, the fishing equipment and so on. Hence, the concept of assemblage provides a way to conceptualise the relations among these elements and their outcomes. DeLanda (2006) clarifies that the relations among elements of an assemblage are not necessary, as in a “system”. Indeed, the concept of system, in both natural and social sciences, is also based on a conceptualisation of the relations among elements that form a whole (the system). The relations among parts of a system are necessary and, as a consequence, the failure of one relation leads to the failure of the whole system. For example, the organs that compose a human body (e.g. heart or brain) are elements of a system (the body) that are in necessary relations with one another (if one organ fails to function the whole system is likely to fail). In social sciences, the concept of “social system” draws on a parallelism with natural systems, in which social institutions (for example, religion or economy) are necessary for the integration of societies (Parsons, 1951). For example, the lack of ethical norms might lead to anomie in society (Durkheim, 1951) and to a disintegration of the social system.

In assemblage theory, the relations among parts are conceptualised differently: the elements enter into the whole via contingent (non-necessary) relations. In other words, the relations can change at any time and the parts can withdraw from one assemblage and enter into other assemblages even with different roles. For example, recreational fishing is composed of several elements like the fishing equipment, the lake with the trout, the guards that enforce the rules and so on. Each of these elements is fundamental for the fishing activities, but their role is at the same time contingent. For example, the use of artificial baits is against the rule when used in natural lakes, but it is allowed in artificial lakes. In addition, people from local communities can use the lakes for different purposes, for example as a source of drinking water. This means that the relationships among elements need to be approached from an historical and empirical point of view, rather than from a pure theoretical point of view as is done with the concept of system. The roles and the relationships of the elements composing an assemblage cannot therefore be deduced in advance, but relates to a ‘structure of space of possibilities’. This notion, according to DeLanda (2002 and 2006), specifies that the capacities / roles of an assemblage and its composing elements are not given in advance. For example, the lake can be used for fishing in one assemblage and as a source of drinking water in another assemblage. Hence, this structure of space of possibilities is a virtual space: a real set of relations that have not been yet actualised into something concrete. Therefore, how the elements enter into relations and the outcomes of the assemblage is something that unfolds thorough empirical and historical processes.

The problem now is how can we account for the empirical dynamics of the assemblage? The following section addresses this problem.

The Assemblage Dimensions

An assemblage is conceptualised along two fundamental dimensions (DeLanda, 2006): a material / expressive dimension and a territorialisation / deterritorialisation dimension. These dimensions refer to the specific role or capacity that an element may play while entering into relationships with the other elements. These roles may also come in mixtures: the same elements can play a mixture of different capacities.

In the first dimension, these capacities may go from a pure material to a pure expressive. DeLanda (2006) seems to follow Deleuze and Guattari (1987) in arguing that the material / expressive dimension of the assemblage is similar to the difference between a set of laws for regulating an order (discipline) and materially exercising such an order (punish). Indeed, Deleuze (1984) discusses how in Foucault’s (1977) book Discipline and Punish the interrelations between the Penal Law (called ‘abstract machine’ by Deleuze), and the actual exercise of the Law (for example in the ‘concrete machine’ of the modern prison), effectively illustrate the expressive / material dimension of the assemblage. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 88), this dimension is the articulation between the semiotic aspects (for example, a statement describing the body) and the material aspects (the body itself and how the body is treated) of the assemblage.

The relation between the Law and its material exercise also illustrates the virtual / actual unfolding of the structure of space of possibilities. The Law is a real element which aims at virtually regulating the exercise of certain functions / activities, such as regulating fishing activities. For example, the Law prescribes that someone caught fishing with artificial baits in a natural lake in Trentino will incur a fine and a ban from fishing. The Law virtually sets a range of possibilities regarding what is possible (fishing with natural baits) and what is not possible (fishing with artificial baits). However, only in certain cases does the Law get actualised in the form of concrete punishments, for example when the guards catch a fisherman that violates the rules. In this example, the virtuality of the Law as the field of possibilities, is actualised in a concrete case.

Finally, it is important to clarify that the relations between the material and expressive capacities are symmetrical, meaning that each can influence the other. This reflects a functional versus a non-functional capacity, as for example in the difference between a city infrastructure (material) and a city skyline (expressive) (Harman, 2008). Hence certain elements or whole assemblages, such as a city, can exercise both material (more functional) and expressive (non-functional) capacities.

The second dimension of the assemblage relates to the territorialisation / deterritorialisation capacities of the elements. According to DeLanda (2006: 13), territorialisation is a process that ‘increases the internal homogeneity of the assemblage’ and that induces a stabilisation of the relations within an assemblage. On the contrary, deterritorialisation does the opposite, decreasing the homogeneity of the assemblage and destabilising the relations among the elements. As before, the elements can play also a mixture of territorialisation / deterritorialisation capacities.

This dimension territorialisation / deterritorialisation, according to DeLanda, relates to a spatial process, such as the difference between a face-to-face communication (territorialisation) and a computer mediated communication (deterritorialisation). Another example is when an organisation operates within the boundary of a specific building(s) (territorialisation) or operates far away from this building (deterritorialisation). For example, as researchers we currently work with our colleagues in a university which is territorialised into the campus buildings. However, when we travel abroad to attend conferences and meet with colleagues from other universities, we have a form of deterritorialisation of the university that from a specific centralised location, moves to various other locations all around the world.

This dimension of the assemblage also relates to non-spatial dynamics. DeLanda (2006) argues that territorialisation can be a process which excludes a certain category of people from the membership of an organisation or a group: this creates homogeneity among the members of that organisation. For example, in certain areas only local people / residents might be entitled to exercise recreational fishing, hence the group of fishermen in that area might become quite homogeneous. In our view, the territorialisation excludes and homogenises not only people but also the possible courses of actions / relations within an assemblage. For example, forbidding the use of artificial baits in natural lakes creates homogeneity of baits, only natural ones can be used to fish. In other words, territorialisation can be a process that homogenises the structure of the space of possibilities and the range of actions within the assemblage (in other words one can only fish using natural baits). On the contrary, deterritorialisation can be a process that increases the possible courses of actions / relations. In conclusion, along this second dimension we can have a process of stabilisation / consolidation (territorialisation) and of destabilisation / dissolution (deterritorialisation) of the assemblage. In the following sections, we provide empirical examples that support our approach to cheating in MMORPGs based on assemblage theory.

The MMORPGs Assemblage

In a recent paper entitled ‘The Assemblage of Play’, Taylor (2009) explores some aspects of the concept of assemblage for game studies. Taylor does not refer directly to DeLanda’s assemblage theory, and she admits just a loose relation with both Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and Latour (2005). This paper by Taylor is interesting for our work because it connects the notion of assemblage with MMORPGs. Taylor asserts that the nature of MMORPGs is particularly complex as it involves a range of different elements such as the legal structures, the game companies, players, technologies and so on and so forth. In particular, Taylor emphasises the crucial importance of what she calls ‘the interrelation’ of these elements and the outcomes of these interrelations. She asserts that ‘in the space of interrelations lie the dynamic processes of play’ (Taylor, 2009: 332). Therefore, for Taylor, “play” is what unfolds from the MMORPGs assemblage. Having introduced the assemblage theory by DeLanda we can certainly paraphrase Taylor and argue that ‘in the space of interrelations lies the dynamic process of cheating in MMORPGs’.

The composite nature of MMORPGs and the interrelation between various elements identified by Taylor can be easily traced. To play a MMORPG a player has to acquire or download the software client and install it on a computer. During the installation process the player has to accept several legal documents such as the End User License Agreement (EULA) or the Terms of Service (ToS). The acceptance of these documents by the player enacts a legal relationship between her and the publishing company. After the client installation, in order to play the player must connect the client to the game server and only at this point can she play the game. In most cases, the player will also navigate the Internet searching for guides, walkthroughs or other paratexts that relate to the game (Consalvo, 2007). Here we already see an initial set of relations between heterogeneous parts – ranging from the player, to the software, to the licenses – that constitutes the MMORPGs assemblage. In what follows, we will describe the role of three crucial elements of the MMORPGs assemblage for cheating: the game architecture, the code and the legal documents. We will also describe how these elements are interleaved with the practices of players, game companies and companies offering cheating software.

What we can call the code level is an important element of the MMORPG assemblage. The code level includes, among other things: the game client, the game code executed on the server, the anti-cheating software as well as the software used by cheaters. The cheating code [8] includes so-called “bots”: computer programs that operate through artificial intelligence routines to automate certain game tasks, such as the action of killing and looting monsters. Bots act as automated player agents (Golle and Ducheneaut, 2005; Joshi, 2008) in what is known as ‘Away From Keyboard’ (AFK) play: the bot can play the game in place of the human player.

Textual artefacts, such as scientific papers and patents, have a crucial role in shaping the use of technologies (see Latour, 1987). In this regard, ‘software legal documents’ are no exception because they play an important role in shaping software users and developers practices (Humphreys et al., 2005; De Paoli et al. 2008). These documents play a crucial role within the MMORPGs assemblage too.

A further crucial element of the MMORPGs assemblage is the ‘architecture’ (see for a discussion Castronova, 2005, chapter 3): the way computers involved in the game communicate and network with each other (see Smed et al. 2002).

These elements (the code, the legal documents and the architecture) and their interrelations can be analysed using the material / expressive and the territorialisation / deterritorialisation dimensions of the assemblage. Moreover, it is important to focus on the structure of the space of possibilities that is enacted by the assemblage from which the qualities of the virtual emerge (what is possible in principle but not yet actualised) and the actual (what is concretely actualised).

The data in this paper draws upon ongoing participant observation (Atkinson and Hammersley, 1994) in the MMORPG Tibia combined with data gathering and analysis of the official Tibia website and forums and the websites and forums of companies offering cheating programs for Tibia. [9] Most of the examples we present focus on the use of bots in Tibia, a practice that involves the illegal manipulation of the game code and the manipulation of communications among computers. We are convinced that botting is a practice which is revealing of some of the dynamics of cheating as assemblage, as it involves the interrelation of several MMORPGs elements, including: the game and cheating code; the legal documents with their enforcement and violations; the game architecture and its possible exploitation; but also the strategies and actions of fair players, cheaters and game and cheating companies. Indeed, Tibia was chosen as a case study because CipSoft, (2009a), the Tibia developer and publisher, has conducted an anti-cheating campaign against the use of bots since January 2009. In our analysis, we have devoted our attention to forum posts directly related to the Tibia anti-cheating campaign. We also use some empirical data related with the anti-cheating tool used in World of Warcraft (WoW), developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com) in 2004, that we collected during a pilot study on cheating in MMORPGs (conducted from September-November 2008). In general, the pilot served to identify recurrent themes in the cheating phenomenon (e.g. the role of anti-cheating tools) as well as familiarising us with the technical and colloquial vocabulary of MMORPGs.

Architecting Cheating in MMORPGs

We begin by describing the role of the game architecture: how computers involved in the game communicate with each other. The most common architecture used in MMORPGs is the client-server, which consists of a centralised server with several clients (the players’ machines) connected to it (see figure 3). One of the crucial characteristics of this architecture is that most of the game code is executed on the server, whereas the client only controls a small fraction of the code. In this set-up, the communication among computers involves a client sending a request to the server, the server validating, or not, the request, and then the server sending the request to all other target clients. For example when a Tibia character such as Talah Teon (Figure 1) kills a monster (such as a Slime), this action must be: first, validated by the server and second the outcome of this action (the increase in level obtained by Talah Teon) is communicated back by the server to all the other clients. In addition, because the server must validate all the requests made by the clients, it can also deny certain actions (for example deny Talah Teon the right to enter the house of an enemy guild).

One of the reasons why the client-server architecture is preferred by game developers is because by executing a large part of the game on the server (including taking the most important game decisions), it is possible to keep the gaming activities under control (Kabus et al., 2005). Other architectures are considered less secure in terms of controlling the game, such as the peer-to-peer (Figure 4) where players depend on other players’ machines for accurate information (Barron, 2001).

The argument that the client-server is the best choice for MMORPGs security highlights a virtual / actual dynamic. Indeed, there are a number of architectures available to developers in terms of how to manage an MMMORPG including: the client-server, the peer-to-peer, and a mix of the previous two. However, the client-server architecture is used in most MMORPGs, including World of Warcraft and Tibia. Here we have the actualisation of one of the (at least) three existing architectures. For example, by adopting the client-server architecture for Tibia, CipSoft has actualised a specific possibility in which the architecture has a role in shaping the practice of gaming: the Tibia client must connect to one of the Tibia servers in order for the player to play the game, moreover most decisions about the game (e.g. validating the killing of a monster) are taken on CipSoft servers and later are communicated back to other clients.

Figure 3: Client-server architecture.

The choice of the client-server architecture implies a terrritorialisation in which there is an attempt, by games developers and publishers, to reduce the range of possible cheating actions by exercising tight control on the execution of the game code. In other words, it is quite difficult for players / cheaters to, for example, modify and exploit the code of the software stored, executed and manipulated on the server, whereas by contrast it is relatively easy to exploit the code stored and executed on the client. This observation is valid in general: all the game information and code controlled and executed on the player machines – including files, memory, drivers, services and so on – can in principle be manipulated illegally (Pritchard, 2000).

Therefore, the client-server architecture possesses a specific spatial territorialisation capacity in which the game code is executed on the company machines in centralised spaces, rather than being deterritorialised onto the player’s machines and spread all around the world. In technical terms, this is often referred to as ‘centralisation’, the idea that access, resources, and data security are controlled almost exclusively via the server.

Figure 4: Peer-to-Peer architecture.

However, the spatial territorialisation of the architecture (the centralisation) can never be total and some information is always stored or manipulated by the clients. Indeed, for performance reasons not all the game states can reside on the server. [11] For example, Hoglund and McGraw (2008: 142) describe the organisation of the data structure [12] of a MMORPG’s character, and state that ‘clearly these data must be stored on the game server, but sometimes the client program controls the values directly’. If the client controls some of the values of the character’s data structure, then an expert programmer could easily manipulate these values to obtain an unfair advantage (for example, increasing a specific skill of that character, by manipulating the values that refer to the skill). Another example comes from Online Real-Time Strategy games where sometimes it is possible to illegally manipulate the client information that controls the “unexplored areas” of the map (Pritchard, 2000). This can bring an unfair advantage by allowing a player to know the location of enemy units.

What follows (figure 5), is an example of centralisation taken from an official Tibia article. This message was released by CipSoft (2009b) with a patch / update for the game software client. It is clear that CipSoft decided to move information on invisible monsters from the clients to the servers. Invisible monsters [13] are creatures that can shoot Tibia characters without revealing where they are and for this reason it is difficult for players to detect where the damage has come from. Prior to the game client update, information on the location of these creatures was controlled directly by the client. This, as CipSoft admits, made this information open to manipulation for cheating purposes.

Figure 5: Centralisation of invisible monsters.

What we have here is clearly a spatial territorialisation that seeks to reduce the possibility of cheating by moving information on ‘invisible monsters’ from the deterritorialised game clients to the centralised game servers.

Figure 6: Some features of BlackDProxy, including the 'invisible monsters display'.

The decision to territorialise the invisible monsters was taken by CipSoft to counteract certain specific forms of exploitation that cheaters could pursue by using bots. For instance, cheating bots for Tibia known as BlackDProxy (see figure 6), TibiabotNG and Elfbot allow the identification and easy killing of invisible monsters. The territorialisation of the monsters from Tibia clients to the servers caused a deterritorialisation (i.e. a destabilisation) of the ‘invisible monster display’ feature of the bots, which became useless. This then triggered a counter process of territorialisation with an attempt by Tibia cheaters to circumvent the obstacle by operating a re-stabilisation of the ‘display invisible monsters’ feature of bots. For example, players who use Elfbot created a workaround that allows the bot to automatically identify the location of invisible monsters, even if their information is not manipulated by the client anymore. This workaround uses some of the game spells [14] to initially detect the position of an invisible monster that then can be targeted by the bot. Figure 7 shows the identification of an invisible monster by using the spell ‘Ice wave’ (left side) and the subsequent killing of the now identified invisible monster (‘Stalker’) by Elfbot (right side).

Figure 7: Workaround for the detection of invisible monsters. Adapted, from http://forums.tibiabot.com/showthread.php?t=76436

Enforcing the Rules and Controlling Users

When players install the software client on their computers, they are asked to accept several documents including the EULA, the ToS and often other documents such as the Game Rules or Privacy Agreements (Castronova, 2005; Kane, 2009). [15] The legal documents reflect the architecture of games: the software client falls under the EULA while the software that runs on the server falls under the protection of the ToS. The acceptance of these documents is mandatory for players, in order to play the game: in this way software licenses impose a structure of space of possibilities, some of which get actualised, for example by certain elements of the code, such as the anti-cheating tools.

An analysis of legal documents is of paramount importance for understanding how cheating unfolds from the MMORPGs assemblage. These legal documents have several implications for both players and game companies, including requiring players to give away some of their rights (Castronova, 2005; Kane, 2009). Often licenses and other legal documents contain terms which aim to regulate and prevent a range of practices including the exploitation of bugs, the use of third party software or the reverse engineering of the client. For example, Tibia’s rule number 3 entitled ‘Cheating’ forbids bug exploitation, hacking and so on (CipSoft, 2009d). Tibia’s rule 3c, ‘Using Unofficial Software to Play’ (Figure 8) states that players are not allowed to manipulate the client program, nor are they allowed to use external software to play.

Figure 8: Tibia’s rule 3c that forbids the use of external software.

Legal documents do not just contain rules that aim to virtually limit player actions, they also contain rules that virtually define the punishments that will be given to players if rules are violated. In Tibia, for example, the Extended Service Agreement says that CipSoft (2009c) can exclude (temporarily or permanently) players from the game whenever they break Tibia rules. Again it is important to emphasise the virtual nature of these regulations: they compose a space of possibilities that find an actualisation only in concrete cases. For instance, during 2009 CipSoft made several mass bans (see for an example figure 9) as part of its anti-cheating campaign. [16] Most of these bans focus on the use by players of bots, in violation of Tibia Rule 3c. These bans are, therefore, an example of the actualisation of both the Tibia Rules (that forbids the use of external software) and the Extended Service Agreement (that establishes the punishment).

Figure 9: A Tibia mass ban: actualisation of the Tibia Rules. From http://www.tibia.com/news/

There is a further element of the virtual / actual qualities of the legal texts: the discrepancy that can exist between the expressive player (i.e. the semiotic players defined by the license) and the material player in flesh and blood. For example, the Tibia Rule 3c defines the expressive player as a person that does not manipulate the game client nor uses additional software to play. We have mentioned before the existence of the Tibia bots whose use is clearly a violation of Rule 3c. Indeed, an analysis of the forums of companies selling bots for Tibia shows that there are several Tibia players that use bots to play the game. This is also well known by the Tibia community and it is often a topic of discussion on the official forums. [17]

One way that game companies can implement their EULAs and ToS is by creating and deploying anti-cheating tools [18]. These anti-cheating tools are software devices that automatically enforce the terms of legal documents. In this regard, these tools operate as material elements of more expressive elements (the legal documents): these tools materially enforce what legal documents discipline. In particular, Consalvo (2007, Chapter 6) identifies and describes three different types of tools: (1) tools that seek to prevent cheating (for example by means of encrypted communication between server and clients), (2) tools that seek to render cheating ineffective (for example by disconnecting the cheater once detected) and finally, (3) tools that seek to detect the use of third party software (such as bots) that tamper with software clients and that, as an outcome, enable game companies to ban the cheaters on the basis of the detection.

Anti-cheating tools also possess territorialisation capacities: they facilitate both the prevention and the punishment of certain cheating practices such as the use of bots, and to a certain extent they allow game companies to stabilise the fairness of games. During the Tibia anti-cheating campaign, CipSoft has introduced a new anti-cheating tool. However, it is not so easy to establish how this tool works, as all the information is kept secret by CipSoft. Therefore, in order to understand the territorialisation capacities of anti-cheating tools we will briefly analyse the role of the Blizzard anti-cheating tool known as ‘the Warden’ (Blizzard, 2005). Indeed, this anti-cheating tool is quite well documented and this will allow us to support our approach. When the player connects the client to the World of Warcraft server, the Warden is downloaded on the fly from Blizzard servers onto the user’s client machine. A Warden is downloaded and runs approximately every 15 seconds. The Warden is composed of small portions of code that are dynamically assembled at each download (the portions of code assembled are slightly different each time). This means that each Warden is different from one another and, therefore, it is difficult to create (cheating) code that can circumvent it. Indeed, if a cheater “captures” a Warden and creates a software countermeasure, then this measure will not be effective because the next Warden(s) downloaded onto the users’ machines will be different from the captured one (Hoglund and McGraw, 2008). Here we have an example of how an anti-cheating tool participates in the cheating assemblage by territorialising (reducing the effectiveness and hence increasing the homogeneity) the cheating code that can be used with the game: because each Warden is unique it is very difficult to develop countermeasures and workarounds.

Anti-cheating tools are controversial parts of the MMORPGs assemblage: the particularly intrusive nature of the Warden means that it cannot be reduced to its role of counteracting cheating. Indeed, the Warden operates like spyware (Terdiman, 2005), scanning the RAM [19] of player machines and doing other intrusive actions such as making screenshots of the user’s computer screen and sending them back to the game servers. Among other things, the Warden searches for code which is executed on the users’ machines and compares it with a dictionary of World of Warcraft known cheating code, which is maintained on Blizzard servers. If the code executed on the user machine matches some of the cheating code in the dictionary, then this is considered an illegal action that triggers possible punishments such as a ban or even deletion of an account. It is clear here that the Warden coupled with a dictionary of know cheating codes – which is maintained by Blizzard – actualises a substantial boundary between detected and undetected cheating code. Interestingly, in this case, the Warden operates a double movement of territorialisation-deterritorialisation. Indeed, the control over possible illegal actions (as defined in legal documents) is not in the first instance exercised on the company servers, but it is deterritorialised onto the players’ machines: the Warden continuously monitors what is happening on users’ machines and only at a second stage it reports the information back to the server, hence operating a territorialisation.

We have described how among other things, tools like the Warden scan the users’ machines searching for cheating code. The Warden exercises control over the players’ machines as a consequence of the players’ acceptance of the legal documents including a ‘Consent to Monitor’ clause. [20] There is a material / expressive relation between the Warden and the Consent to Monitor. The Warden materially exercises monitoring and other forms of control (a digital form of Foucauldian panopticon or what Braman calls panspectron), whereas the Consent to Monitor clause is the crucial term that disciplines the monitoring, by legally entitling the game company to a right to control the players’ machines. This is an example in which a game EULA demands players to give away some of their rights.

Figure 10: The Consent to Monitor. From http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/legal/eula.html

As already noted, a further example of the role of anti-cheating tools comes from Tibia. In this game, an anti-cheating tool was introduced at the beginning of 2009 as part of CipSoft’s anti-cheating campaign, in order to counter-act the use of bots and third party software.

MMORPGs are often affected by the existence of third party companies that produce and sell bots that automate gameplay. For instance, a well known example from World of Warcraft is the software ‘glider’ (see for a discussion Consalvo, 2009: 412-413). Two “cheating companies” called respectively BlackDtools (producer of BlackDProxy) and NGSoft (producer of TibiaBot NG and Elfbot) create bots for Tibia. From the point of view of Tibia cheating companies, the anti-cheating tool has clearly introduced a deterritorialisation: the tool has destabilised existing programming practices and market relations between these cheating companies and cheaters (De Paoli and Kerr, 2010). Before the introduction of the anti-cheating tool the relationships among cheating companies and their customers were quite stable: the use of bots in Tibia was almost undetected by Tibia Game Masters and generally unpunished by CipSoft. Moreover, before the introduction of the tool the market for bots was flourishing. The anti-cheating tool has, however, broken this stability by making the bots detectable. Moreover, Tibia bot customers are now asking for the creation of undetectable bots and the Tibia cheating companies are trying to create them: clearly a territorialisation that seek to stabilise relations again (Figure 11). To date, however, the cheating companies appear to have failed to develop undetectable bots.

Figure 11: Creation of undetectable bots.

The Expressive Capacity of Anti-Cheating Measures

There are several strategies that game developers can use to restrict illegal gameplay actions. We have briefly described anti-cheating tools and their material capacity to implement the expressive capacity of legal documents, particularly in relation to bots. We have also described the territorialisation capacity of anti-cheating tools as a way to reduce the range of possible players cheating practices. A further territorialisation capacity of anti-cheating measures comes from the introduction of design elements into the gameplay that seek to restrict cheating, (Consalvo, 2007). For example, in Tibia ‘Antibot Intelligent Monsters’ (AIMs) [21] have been introduced to counteract the AFK play and the use of bots. These AIMs possess special features: they look like ordinary monsters, they have the same name as ordinary monsters, but they can cause greater damage to Tibia characters compared to normal monsters. Moreover, AIMs heal very fast making them almost impossible to kill. The role of AIMs is also expressive given that they result from the execution of game code on the game server. These monsters are indeed expressive outcomes (non-functional) of the material code (functional) that implements them. This consideration shows that anti-cheating measures do not necessarily exercise a material role, as anti-cheating tools do.

If Tibia (human) players encounter one of these AIMs they must try to escape from them because AIMs inflicts great damage and can easily kill even powerful characters. By contrast a character automated with AFK features has a greater chance of getting killed by these AIMs. Indeed, characters played by bots will automatically attack these AIMs and stick on them because they cannot distinguish an AIM from an ordinary monster. In most cases the AIMs will kill characters controlled by the bot.

The introduction of AIMs triggered an innovation process by Tibia cheaters who created workarounds [21]: small scripts that allow bots to recognise AIMs. There is a double territorialisation / deterritorialisation at work here. A solution to the problem of AIMs is simply to write a script that will induce the bot to ignore a monster if the attack has lasted for more than a certain fixed time (say for example 15 seconds): IF (‘Attack.Last  > 15 Seconds’ & ‘Monster = Still Alive’) THEN (‘Withdrawn From Attacking’ & ‘Escape’). Another workaround takes advantage of the consideration that often AIMs possess a different speed compared to ordinary monsters. A simple script can detect the speed difference and induce the bots to ignore the AIMs. The code in this case possesses a territorialisation capacity. These scripts allow the bots to ignore the AIMs and they stabilise cheating activities. However, the introduction of the scripts for ignoring the AIMs is also a deterritorialisation: these scripts made AIMs almost a useless anti-cheating measure.

Towards Future Studies of Cheating: Counterplay as Imbroglio

This special issue of Fibreculture invites authors to consider how the concept of ‘Counterplay’ might be used to ‘investigate the controversies that surround certain insurgent actions or innovations in gaming communities’. We are of the opinion that the investigation of cheating in MMORPGs based on the concept of assemblage is a useful approach in itself but that it can also contribute conceptually to our understanding of counterplay. The concept of assemblage can be used to investigate the outcomes of the interrelation among elements composing a virtual world over time and thus can contribute to an emergent understanding of what might constitute ‘counterplay’. However, in order to appreciate this contribution we will need to clarify a few aspects and highlight how counterplay might differ from other, perhaps, similar concepts. In particular, the concept of counterplay may be overly suggestive of player resistance (counter-play) and subversive forms of play and this aspect will need to be tempered conceptually if we are to develop counterplay in relation to assemblage. Indeed, in this paper we have rejected this type of a priori judgment, arguing for the study of interrelations among elements of the MMORPGs assemblage, rather than purely the study of player actions and motivations.

Previous work has examined forms of play which deviate from the design and script of the game. One of the concepts deployed to grasp this is that of ‘transgressive play’, defined as an act by a player which signals an attempt to rebel against the rules of the game (Aarseth 2007). Most examples of subversive play styles and exploitation of design flaws focus on how players subvert the “ideal player” imagined and scripted by the game designer. In a similar vein, Atkins (2003: 49-50) talks of the pleasures of transgressing and subversive play. The focus of this work is, therefore, on acts which may, or may not, become pervasive but are deviations from the game rules and the ideal player as envisaged by the designer. Sundén (2007: 2) develops this concept of ‘transgressive play’ further and argues that transgressive play is play as innovation, and that while games position ideal players, players are also positioned by the wider game culture. Her work focuses on how gay and lesbian players adopt forms of ‘queer play’ to subvert the regulations and design of online games. Transgressive play, however, fails for us to capture the dynamism of the matrix of interrelations in MMORPGs as assemblage and focuses too much on individual player acts.

A different approach proposed by Kücklich (2009), attempts to engage with the heterotopic nature of the gamespace which involves both the ruled and unruled spaces. For Kücklich, we need to account for not only the antagonisms within the game but also the wider social, political and cultural contexts in which these antagonisms are embedded. He proposes that we view cheating as a ‘de-ludic’ practice [22] which brings to the fore the machinic agencements of digital gameplay but which includes more than the player and the technological, and takes us into a ‘de-territorialised’ gamespace. This deterritorialisation admits and opens up the linkages between the real and the virtual. Unlike the previous authors, he suggests that cheating is more than an attempt to assert identity but rather is an attempt to refuse to accept constraints and an attempt to rearrange the entire topology of a game (Kücklich, 2009:165). As such it can be to varying degrees a political act. The notion that the user and the machine are in a reciprocal relationship which is shaped by wider contexts than the games rules has much in common with our approach even if the author has failed to deploy the concept empirically so far.

What these works highlight is an attempt by academics to capture the struggle between the real game player and the game text with its rules and embedded script based on an ideal or implied player. While this relationship may be conceptualised as a struggle for control, or as antagonism, the renegotiation of rules and the struggle for control is also a key pleasure of playing games (Marshall, 2002). Without overstating the control of the player or their ability to resist rules it is clear that the various elements of the MMORPGs assemblage are not static but are continually being reshaped according to contingent interrelations amongst them. “Play” (Taylor, 2009) as well as “cheating” (this paper), are what unfolds from the interrelations and from MMORPGs as assemblage. We believe that the practices that we have documented so far are more than transgressive in that they have implications for the entire topology of the game well beyond the immediate game space. Indeed, playing with, as well as within the game space, is done by players, game publishers and third party companies. Hence, we propose that any understanding of counterplay must go beyond descriptions of individual and perhaps marginal player acts in games to other elements including the game architecture, legal documents and code and other players including the game companies and the technology.

In particular, we support the idea that cheating emerges from the dynamics unleashed by the ‘intertwined qualities of the virtual and the actual, which work to mobilise a series of subjects, objects and things toward a variety of ends’, as stated in the ‘Counterplay’ call for papers. This is precisely what the assemblage approach to the study of cheating in MMORPGs allows us to capture: (1) the non-essentialism and (2) what unfolds (the outcomes) from the MMORPGs assemblage.

Indeed, it should be clear by now that we cannot regard cheating in MMORPGs as just what brings unfair advantages to cheaters. Elements such as the “architecture”, the “code” in its various forms (including the game code, the anti-cheating tools and bot programs) and the “legal documents” do not bring unfair advantages to cheaters per se. However, it is from their interrelation and their ability to play at the same time material and expressive capacities (in a Discipline and Punish like relation), and territorialisation and deterritorialisation capacities, that several elements of cheating unfold. The virtual / actual relations between the game rules, their applications and enforcement, and their violation by cheaters, are an outcome of the interrelation among the code, the legal documents and the architecture. The control exercised by games companies on the players’ machines also unfolds from the interrelation of anti-cheating tools, legal documents and the architecture. Anti-bot monsters (AIMs), as a form of anti-cheating measures, also emerge from the relations between the materiality of the code executed on the game servers and the expressive capacity of AIMs to be part of the gameplay.

We opened this paper by asking how can we define cheating in MMORPGs? This paper has discussed the limits – and especially their essentialist view – of current mainstream definitions of cheating. This has left us, however, without a concrete definition that can be used in future empirical and theoretical investigations. It is important, therefore, to conclude by attempting to provide a new definition of cheating in MMORPGs and online games, based on the concept of assemblage.

It is clear that when we speak about cheating in digital games we use the English meaning of the word “cheating”. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives several definition of cheating [23] including ‘to act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage’. [24] This definition is the same essentialist definition adopted in much of the current literature on cheating in games. However, the translation of cheating into other languages conveys slightly different meanings that can be useful for our purposes. The Italian translation of cheating as barare, means to act dishonestly for obtaining unfair advantages, especially when playing games such as card games. However, in Italian we can also translate the English word “to cheat” as imbrogliare (verb) or imbroglio (noun). The word imbroglio is also used in English and the OED defines it as ‘a state of great confusion and entanglement; a complicated or difficult situation (esp. political or dramatic); a confused misunderstanding or disagreement, embroilment’. The OED definition of imbroglio just grasps some aspects of the meaning of the word imbroglio in Italian where it has instead an ambivalent meaning (i.e. both and at once) of (1) an entanglement and confusion of different things as well as that of (2) tricking someone with the clear purpose of obtaining something which was not supposed to be obtained in the first place. In particular, it is thanks to the imbroglio as the entanglement, confusion (in the sense of making things looking like something else) and manipulation of different things that tricks can succeed. Moreover, depending on the situation, these imbroglios can provide legal or illegal advantages. We think that the word imbroglio can constitute the basis for the new definition of cheating in MMORPGs based on the concept of assemblage that we are looking for.

The term imbroglio to define cheating in MMORPGs finds also an important ally in the work of the sociologist Bruno Latour where he conceptualises the relationships between what he calls human and non-human entities by rejecting essentialist approaches based on dualist views. Latour (1999: 204) uses the phrase ‘sociotechnical imbroglios’ in order to describe the human and non-human seamless web as well as to replace the Cartesian subject-object dualism. The use of the word imbroglio made by Latour is very close to our own, but certainly more general. Indeed, a sociotechnical imbroglio is for Latour: non-essentialist because it rejects essences such as subject or object and is based on the interrelations (actor-networks) and entanglement of heterogeneous human and non-human entities, such as the laboratory which is composed of technical apparatuses and human scientists. The outcomes of these sociotechnical imbroglios (when successful) are for Latour (1987: 128-129) functioning machinations (tricks in our terms): working technologies or indisputable matters of fact.

We suggest that the word imbroglio can provide a new starting point for studies of cheating in MMORPGs. This word encourages us to see cheating as assemblage: the entanglement – as interrelation – of different elements, whose purpose is to obtain a successful trick as result (non-essentialism). The fishing example is again useful here to understand the point. Fishing is a form of imbroglio in which the fish is induced to eat the bait (artificial or natural) by a trick: the fish is made to believe that the baits are food rather than a dangerous trap. Fishing is based on the entanglement of all the fishing elements including the fishermen, the trout, the fishing equipment and so on. Moreover, depending on the situation (artificial or natural lakes) certain forms of imbroglio (the artificial baits in relation with other fishing elements) are considered to be illegal or not.

The Tibia case is full of imbroglios too. The Tibia AIMs are a form of imbroglio in which the Tibia bots are tricked by an interrelation of elements that includes: the executed (monsters) code, the monsters that look like ordinary monsters during game play, and the limits of the bots’ artificial intelligence routines that cannot recognise the imbroglios. The imbroglio lies in the fact that bots cannot distinguish between an ordinary monster and an AIM. A further example of imbroglio comes from bots where computer code (including the bots as well as the game code) and legal documents are deeply entangled to make the automatic player agent act like a human player agent. In so doing an imbroglio is perpetrated as, among other things, the bot wants to make other players (but also anti-cheating tools or Game Masters) believe that there is a human player playing the character. Therefore, if the general perception is that a human is playing (instead of a bot) then there is no violation of the legal documents.

To conclude, defining cheating in MMORPGs as imbroglio and adopting an assemblage approach provides a useful alternative perspective to conceptualise cheating in MMORPGs and a contribution to building the concept of counterplay. The consideration that our use of imbroglio is limited to a specific area, that of cheating in MMORPGs, compared to the use of this word made by Latour (which is instead general), does not undermine our initial intuition. On the contrary, it makes the use of this concept even more relevant as a possible basis for our future empirical and theoretical investigations. Indeed, we will be able to study cheating in MMORPGs as imbroglio by relying on approaches that share a similar non-essentialist view. This includes conceptual frameworks such as assemblage theory (DeLanda, 2002 and 2006), Actor-Network-Theory (Latour, 1987 and 2005) and the Critique of Information (Lash, 2002). Indeed, “cheating as imbroglio” is a definition that offers a new starting point for studying the inter-relational dynamics of cheating in MMORPGs and what unfolds – the general outcomes – of these interrelations.

Notes

[1] Virtual here is not used as in ‘virtual reality’ but as the field of possibilities. See section ‘The Assemblage Theory’ of this paper.

[2] For statistics on major MMORPGs: http://www.mmogchart.com

[3] List of monsters: http://tibia.wikia.com/wiki/Creatures

[4] An alternative is the work by Kücklich (2007 and 2009) that sees cheating as a methodological tool for digital games research.

[5] See for a discussion Kücklich (2007).

[6] The reason for this rule is that these artificial baits could damage those fishes who evade capture.

[7] Another approach could be the Actor-Network Theory, or ANT (Latour, 2005). In this paper we prefer the Assemblage Theory because it does not force us to take the point of view of some actors (e.g. engineers) as in ANT.

[8] This includes technical instruments (e.g. decompilers) and techniques (e.g. reverse engineering).

[9] Official Tibia forums http://forum.tibia.com/forum/?subtopic=communityboards; Cheating companies forums: http://www.blackdtools.com/forum/ and http://forums.tibiabot.com/

[10] These posts have been collected using the Firefox archiving software Scrapbook http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/

[11] A state refers to all the values of memory, registers and other component of the computer that change during the execution of a program.

[12] The data structure is a way of storing and organising computer data.

[13] See http://tibia.wikia.com/wiki/Invisibility.

[14] Spells are magical syntaxes that can be cast by characters. Some spells (e.g. Ice Wave) damage monsters, others are meant to heal one’s character and so on. See http://tibia.wikia.com/wiki/Spell

[15] Tibia legal documents:  http://www.tibia.com/support/?subtopic=legaldocuments.  World of Warcraft legal documents http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/legal/

[16] 10 mass bans so far with the (temporary) ban of almost 50000 accounts.

[17] See for example: http://forum.tibia.com/forum/?action=thread&threadid=1978162

[18] Several anti-cheating tools are used by game companies. A well known example is  ‘Punkbuster’. See:  http://www.evenbalance.com/

[19] Random Access Memory is a writable and volatile computer memory.

[20] The EULAs of other MMORPGs contain similar terms: ‘Runescape’ (Rule 7), ‘Warhammer’ (EULA term 2G) and ‘The Age of Conan’ (EULA term 5). In Tibia, the Privacy Policy allows the use of anti-cheating tools http://www.tibia.com/support/?subtopic=legaldocuments&page=privacy

[21] See: http://forums.tibiabot.com/showthread.php?t=101002

[22] For Kücklich, ‘de-ludo’ should be understood in terms of its Latin roots which means, amongst other things, to cheat.

[23] Including: betraying someone else (like a wife betraying her husband), or confiscating someone else’s property.

[24] http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/cheat?view=uk

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the Irish Higher Education Authority under the PRTLI 4 programme and their partners on the ‘Serving Society: Future Communications Networks and Services’ project (2008-2010).

We would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

Authors’ Biographies

Stefano De Paoli is postdoctoral researcher at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, where he works on a research project on the Future of the Internet. Stefano has worked in Science and Technology Studies since 2004 focusing on an investigation of software licenses. Recently, his research interest has embraced Massive Multiplayer Online Games with a focus on cheating and cheating prevention. More on Stefano (including publications list) at http://www.nuim.ie/nirsa/people/postdocs/stefano_de_paoli.shtml

Email: Stefano.depaoli at nuim.ie

Aphra Kerr is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Ireland Maynooth.  Her research focuses on the regulation, production and consumption of digital media and digital games. Her publications include ‘The Business and Culture of Digital Games’ (Sage 2006). Aphra was a founding member of the Digital Games Research Association (DIGRA) and is an academic member of Women in Games (Europe). She established and runs the industry and community website www.gamedevelopers.ie.

Email: Aphra.kerr at nuim.ie

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Greig de Peuter, New York University

Street Games

Revolts within the gates, protests in the desert beyond, accusations of human-rights violations, and, embarrassingly for the private corporation running the compound, successful escape attempts—the Immigration Reception and Processing Centre holding nearly 1,500 refugee claimants in the desert at Woomera, Australia, was notorious. Detention is among the most draconian devices of imperial control. A government policy barring access by the press meant outsiders could only imagine living conditions within the center— until someone made these conditions a topic of virtual play. Built as a Half-Life mod, Escape from Woomera is an activist-made game that set out to recreate the camp’s “architecture of intensity and fear” from the point of view of asylum-seeking inmates “ever-alert for what sources of danger lie around the corner” and trying to find a way out (Wilson 2005, 114). The game involved an alliance of digital designers, investigative journalists, and migrant rights activists (see Schott and Yeatman 2005, 84). The mere announcement of its construction stirred controversy about detention in Australia, especially since the game’s early stages were financed by a government arts grant. Escape from Woomera didn’t progress past prototype. But even as an unfinished demo, it contributed to the wider current of Australian antidetention activism that shut down the center in 2003.

Leap a year and a hemisphere. Late at night on August 28, 2004, as the U.S. Republican Party’s National Convention met in New York City, a mobile troop of ludic activists took to the streets. Two female cyborgs, one with a laptop, another with a video projector, beamed visuals from America’s Army onto downtown buildings as the game was hacked, in real- time, by coconspirators linking in from different locations around the world. This was OUT, “a live action wireless gaming urban intervention.” Playing on MOUT (Military Operations on Urban Terrain), the U.S. military doctrine rehearsed in Full Spectrum Warrior, OUT’s architects demanded, “The United States OUT of Iraq and the Middle East. Escalating worldwide Militarism and Violence, from whatever source, (right-wing oil hungry U.S. capitalists or wealthy Islamic fundamentalists), OUT of Civilian Life. The U.S. Army and Pentagon computer game developers OUT of the minds of prepubescent gamers.” OUT was the brainchild of Opensorcery (2004), an initiative that for nearly a decade has troubled the militarist bent and gender norms of game culture through a variety of hacktivisms, its best known the Velvet Strike interventions in the multiplayer online shooter Counter-Strike, where it digitally scrawled peace signs and encouraged gamers to give each other virtual blow jobs instead of virtually blowing each other away. Now this crew of media activists dissolved amid the 800,000 protesters converging on the street during the Republican convention that nominated George W. Bush to run for his second term as president.

Jump another in autumn of 2005. The torched cars had barely cooled, tear gas hung in the streets, and the riot squads still stood ready for any rekindling of the four-week uprising by immigrant youths in the banlieux (suburbs) of Paris when a video account from the insurgents’ point of view circulated around the Internet. Alternative-media messages are a familiar part of political crisis. But this one was different: The French Democracy, created by twenty-six-year-old Alex Chan under the pseudonym “Koulamata,” was made using a commercial video game, The Movies. Published by Lionhead, The Movies invites players to manage their own Hollywood studio (“Build Your Own Movie Empire” is one of its marketing slogans) and includes machinima tools allowing player-producers to record computer-generated animated films in real time. Lionhead’s promotion emphasized the creation of comedies, dramas, and other entertainment genres. But Chan made a thirteen-minute political documentary. It dramatized the police- pursuit death of two immigrant boys that had sparked the riots, and the racism, unemployment, white-fright indifference, and frustration of racialized communities reviled by politicians that were its wider context. Chan explained his intention: “to bring people to think about what really happened in my country by trying to show the starting point and some causes of these riots” (cited in Musgrove 2005). Posted to The Movies Online Web site, where Lionhead encouraged players to exhibit their productions so as to publicize its game, The French Democracy, made for a cost of some $60, was downloaded many times, for free, was uploaded to YouTube, drew widespread press attention, and was shown at from the banlieux to leap across the Atlantic and around the world.

Escape from Woomera, OUT, and The French Democracy show that players can and do fight back against games of Empire. They are examples of a different dynamic, that of games of multitude.

Games of Empire

Our point of departure is the controversial definition of Empire offered by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000). They claim we are witnessing the emergence of a new planetary regime in which economic, administrative, military, and communicative components combine to create a system of power “with no outside” (xii). Earlier imperialism, such as ancient Rome, sixteenth century Spain, or nineteenth century Britain were in their time rooted in specific nations that dominated the world map. What distinguishes Hardt and Negri’s Empire (upper case) from these empires is that it is not directed by any single state. Rather, it is a system of rule crystallized by what Karl Marx (1858) called the “world market.” Empire is governance by global capitalism. This domination works, Hardt and Negri (2000, 167) say, through “network power.” Its de-centered, multi-layered institutional agencies include nation-states, but extend to include multinational corporations, like Microsoft and Sony, world economic bodies, like the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, international organizations like the United Nations, and even non-governmental organizations, like Red Cross. What results from the interaction of these nodes is, they claim, an imperium more comprehensive than any preceding one.

But this is not just an analysis of international relations. Hardt and Negri offer something more ambitious, a comprehensive account of conditions of work, forms of subjectivity, and types of struggle in contemporary capital. Empire is, they say, global not only in terms of its geographic reach but also of its social scope. Capital now taps its subjects’ energies at multiple points: not just at work (as labour-power), but also as consumers (the “mind share” targeted by marketers), in education and training (university degrees as vocational preparation), and even as a source of raw materials (the bio-value extracted for genetic engineering). Empire is thus a regime of “biopower”—a concept borrowed from the philosopher Michel Foucault (1990, 135-45)—exploiting social life in its entirety.

Within this system, Hardt and Negri (2000, 289-94) ascribe an especially important place to what they and others term “immaterial labour” (Dowling et al. 2007; Lazzarato 1996; Virno and Hardt 1996). Immaterial labour is, according to the theorists who devised the term, work that creates “immaterial products” such as “knowledge, information, communication, a relationship or an emotional response” (Hardt and Negri 2004, 108). It involves the less tangible symbolic and social dimensions of commodities. There are various subcategories of immaterial labour: high technology work manipulating the codes on which computers and networks run; affective work, generating emotion of, say, ease or excitement; and work involving social coordination and communication in a wide range of neo-managerial tasks. Immaterial labour is, Hardt and Negri (2000) say, the leading or “hegemonic” form of work in the global capitalism of Empire. This ascendancy is not quantitative—they recognize that not everyone works with computers or in a creative industry—but qualitative: immaterial labour is the activity advanced capital depends on its most dynamic and strategic sectors. The importance of immaterial labour to Empire can be grasped by thinking of how central media, marketing, communication, and surveillance are, not just in creating new commodities—such as videogames—but also in managing the workplaces that produce them and appealing to the consumers that buy them. It is, moreover, through the fiber-optic cables and wireless connections of digital networks run by immaterial labour that the tendrils of business stretch around the planet, the equivalents for today’s Empire of the Roman roads that tied together Caesar’s domain.

If this picture of a world swallowed by capital was all there was to Hardt and Negri’s Empire, it would be just another account of corporate domination of a familiar sort. What made people take notice was that their book spoke about opposition to capitalism–even of alternatives to it. The book came out at the high-water mark of the struggles against corporate globalization that were racing around the planet from the jungles of Chiapas to the streets of Seattle. Hardt and Negri (2000, 393-414) declared this wave of activism signaled a new revolutionary power—“the multitude.” The multitude is made up of many protagonists pushing for a more democratic deployment of global resources, including workers and unions, but also indigenous communities struggling over land rights, students opposing the corporate campus, anti-poverty groups fighting for a living wage, migrants contesting the oppression of borders, environmentalists demanding ecological conservation, open-source advocates promoting knowledge sharing . . . Compared with characteristic left gloom, Hardt and Negri’s book was a breath of hope. Crucially, they spoke not of anti-globalization, but of a movement for another globalization, an “exodus” from capital (Hardt and Negri 2000, 210). In this sense, what distinguishes the concept of immaterial labour from theories about, say, a “creative class,” is its link to ideas of autonomy and struggle. It comes from a line of thought—that of autonomist Marxism—that emphasizes not the right and power of corporations to control life in the name of profit, but rather the way workers’ desires exceed, challenge, and escape that control (see Dyer-Witheford 1999).

Our hypothesis is that videogames are a paradigmatic media of Empire–planetary, militarized hyper-capitalism–and of some of the forces presently challenging it. Why are virtual games the media of Empire, integral to and expressive of it like no other? They originated in the US military-industrial complex, the nuclear-armed core of capital’s global domination, to which power they remain umbilically connected. They were created by the hard-to-control hacker knowledge of a new type of intellectual worker, immaterial labour, vital to a fresh phase of capitalist expansion. In that phase, game machines have served as ubiquitous everyday incubators for the most advanced forces of production and communication, tutoring entire generations in digital technologies and networked communication. The game industry has pioneered methods of accumulation based on intellectual property rights, cognitive exploitation, cultural hybridization, transcontinentally subcontracted dirty work, and world-marketed commodities. Game making blurs the lines between work and play, production and consumption, voluntary activity and precarious exploitation, in a way that typifies the boundless exercise of biopower. At the same time, games themselves are an expensive consumer commodity which the global poor can only access illicitly, demonstrating the massive inequalities of this regime. Virtual games simulate identities as citizen-soldiers, free-agent workers, cyborg-adventurers, and corporate-criminals: virtual play trains flexible personalities for flexible jobs, shapes subjects for militarized markets, and makes becoming a neoliberal subject fun. And—taking us to the focus of this article—games exemplify Empire because they are also exemplary of the multitude, in that game culture includes subversive and alternative experiments searching for a way out. Just as the eighteenth-century novel was a textual apparatus generating the bourgeois personality required by mercantile colonialism (but also capable of criticizing it), and as twentieth-century cinema and television were integral to industrial consumerism (yet screened some of its darkest depictions), so virtual games are media constitutive of twenty-first century global hyper-capitalism and, perhaps, also of lines of exodus from it.

The Multitude and the Media

The multitude is the social force that is at once the motor and the antagonist, the engine and the enemy, of Empire (Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004). It can be defined in three different but connected ways.

First, the multitude refers to new forms of subjectivity (Hardt and Negri 2000, 195–97; Virno 2004, 75–93). It is based in emergent individual and collective human capacities, the fresh ways of producing, communicating, and cooperating that global capital requires to run its vast and complex Empire. The example central to our topic is the technological and cultural know-how energizing immaterial industries such as the video game business, though there are also other, and not unrelated, instances, such as the cosmopolitan literacies of the massive mobile migrant labor flows integral to the world economy. Capital needs and, up to a point, fosters these new ways of being human. Empire is, however, a thoroughly ambivalent system. To use an old metaphor from Marx and Engels (1848, 85–86), capital is like the sorcerer’s apprentice, conjuring up forces it cannot fully control. Multitudinous subjectivity is not only technically astute and culturally creative but also potentially subversive because its skills, aptitudes, and desires exceed the uses to which Empire tries to confine them.

This takes us to a second manifestation of the multitude—new movements opposing global capital (see Notes from Nowhere 2003 for an overview). Hardt and Negri’s main theme is the way Empire’s subjects refuse to submit to its bottom-line logic. Despite all the apparent victories of the world market, time and again resistances to the total monetization of social relations and the primacy of primacy of profit erupt. Because corporate power has enveloped society so completely, there are myriad points around which insurgencies spring up: the environment, citizenship status, housing, employment, education, public space, art, and media. Grassroots mobilizations against corporate globalization from the jungles of Chiapas to the streets of Quebec City, international resistance to the invasion of Iraq, the struggles of nonstatus people, and the wave of ecological activism around global warming are all instances of a multitude contesting Empire.

Such movements open up a third dimension of the multitude—a capacity not only to resist Empire but also to develop, protect, and propose alternatives. Hardt and Negri (2000, 400) say the “political project” of the multitude is nothing less than constituting a world other than that of global capital. They have been—fairly—criticized for not providing a full account of this large task. But they do sketch some elements of a program: a “global citizenship”; the right to a social wage and a guaranteed income for all; and free access to, and control over, “knowledge, information, communication and affects” (396–407). Of particular importance to our discussion is the importance they give to wresting control of the means of communication away from capital. The “indymedia” of the counterglobalization movement, with their famous slogan “Don’t hate the media, become the media,” are a key expression of the multitude’s “powerful desire for global democracy” (Hardt and Negri 2004, 305).

When all three dimensions of the multitude—subjective capacity, social movement, political project—coalesce, Hardt and Negri suggest they become a utopian arrow, pointing to a possible future life beyond Empire.

This optimistic account of the multitude is, however, tempered by other authors. Paolo Virno also explores the concept of multitude but emphasizes the way it can oscillate between subversion and submission. He stresses that contemporary capital is very good at adopting apparently iconoclastic practices and utopian ideas as management techniques and revenue sources. Information-age, post-Fordist enterprise, with its participatory workplaces and social networking, presents the face of what he terms “the communism of capital” (Virno 2004, 110)—a regime of profit that invokes team spirit, revolutionary change, and individual empowerment the better to harness people to work. Thus, Virno notes, while one “emotional tonality” (84) of the multitude is the radical energy that Hardt and Negri celebrate, its other side is a cynical opportunism and nihilistic resignation born of pragmatic adjustment to a world where capital seems to swallow everything.

It is also ambiguity that Virno highlights in discussing the relation of the multitude to media. He begins with the category of the spectacle. From grumblings about Rome’s “bread and circuses” to the Situationists’ scathing account of the twentieth-century “society of the spectacle” (Debord 1967) to Retort’s (2005) more recent emphasis on the importance of spectacle to American global power, critics have long pointed to the role of extravagant media displays in exciting, intimidating, distracting, and ultimately pacifying the subjects of a social order. But today spectacle has, Virno suggests, a “double nature” (2004, 60). One part is the subjugation of culture to the commodity form; the other is intensifying “productive communication.” In contemporary capitalism, the industries that create spectacle—the so-called cultural or creative industries—driven by their own profit-seeking dynamic, make and disseminate the tools of communication. To capture the attention of people, and even to involve and exploit new types of labor, they give people instruments for producing and reproducing media in a way that paradoxically diminishes capital’s monopoly of spectacular power.

This analysis clearly applies to virtual games. Interactivity seems to break with the passivity traditionally associated with watching spectacular entertainment. The possibility for players to select even limited—though in new games, rapidly widening—options and to become involved in practices of modding, machinima making, and MMO participation appears to mark a quantum jump in engagement beyond that of, say, networked television audiences. We want, however, to insist on what Virno (2006) terms “the ambivalence of the multitude” and even to amplify his point. As we noted in the introduction, many scholars of game studies see interactivity as automatically empowering and democratizing. But although the capacity for “productive communication” Virno describes may overcome spectacle, it doesn’t necessarily do so: on the contrary, it can be subordinated to, and even intensify, spectacular power. When a Canadian solider creates a Half-Life 2 mod, Insurgency, allowing gamers to take either side in Iraq, it is not to challenge the logic of the war on terror but to enrich cultural militarization: “If you just want to get into the action and have some fun, grab your AK47 . . . and let loose as a Guerrilla or Paramilitary fighter.” Similarly, when Second-Life-ers sell their skills to advertising agencies beaming brands to the virtual world, the outcome is deeper commodification. Here we recall Retort’s point that contemporary spectacular life is a “self-administered reality” (2005, 187): subjects already deeply immersed in a commodified and militarized regime are provided the means to animate, elaborate, reextend their own commodification and militarization, all the while having empowerment-through-interactivity trumpeted in their ears by acolytes of corporate power. People no longer just view wartime capital “accumulated to the degree that it becomes images” (Debord 1967, para. 34) but insert themselves into this image, labor at its accumulation, as its self-spectacularizing cocreators (see Wark 2007, para. 111). This is not a break with spectacle. It is an ever-deeper affective and intellectual investment in it.

An analysis of the multitude’s relation to media after 2001 cannot, then, just applaud “indymedia.” Rather, it has to recognize what Matteo Pasquinelli (2006) describes as conditions of “immaterial civil war” (see also Lovink and Schneider 2003). New media such as Web 2.0 applications, social software, the blogosphere, and, of course, recent generations of virtual games are both the terrain and the prize of a pitched battle, fought twenty-four hours a day across innumerable digital devices and platforms, between two sides of the multitude’s collective subjectivity—creative dissidence and profitable compliance. On the one side are the prospects for what theorists such as Steve Best and Douglas Kellner (2004) and Henry Giroux (2006) term “interactive spectacle,” in which the participatory capacities of digital machines are captured to reinforce imperial power; on the other, the possibilities that Steven Duncomb (2007) identifies when he discusses opportunities for “ethical spectacles” that turn media dream-worlds to radical ends.

Tracking this ambivalence is the project of this book. So far we have focused on how virtual games reinforce actual Empire. Yet our analysis also revealed conflict, from the unauthorized creativity of the first game makers to the online denunciation of labor exploitation by EA Spouse, to Xbox hacking, to guerrilla war simulators, to MMO players’ transgressions and the controversies over the modding of GTA. Games and gamers get out of the control of their corporate military sponsors. Many of these lines of flight are recouped by game capital, and some are black holes of pointless or destructive energy, but all persuade us that it isn’t quite “game over” yet. Game culture is full of glibly promoted “empowerment” and slickly marketed “participation” that provide game capital free labor and expanded revenues. Yet it is also and simultaneously shot through with instances of player self-organization, from warez collectives to tactical game makers, which intersect with movements against Empire. Despite everything, as Hardt and Negri say, “the spectacle of imperial order is not an iron-clad world, but actually opens up the real possibility of its overturning” (2000, 324). Games of Empire are thus also games of multitude.

So we turn now to what Alexander Galloway dubs “counter gaming”: the prospect of playing against—and beyond—games of Empire (2006, 107–26). We survey six pathways of multitudinous activity that can be seen, sensed, or speculated on at the margins—and sometimes deep in the heart—of contemporary video game culture: counterplay, or acts of contestation within and against the ideologies of individual games of Empire; dissonant development, the emergence of critical content in a few mainstream games; tactical games designed by activists to disseminate radical social critique; polity simulators, associated with the educational and training projects of the “serious games” movement; the self-organized worlds of players producing game content independently of commercial studios, especially in MMOs; and finally software commons challenging restrictions on, and monopoly control over, game- related intellectual property. Not all these often-intersecting paths are as explicitly militant as the “street games” with which we started this chapter; many are tentative, and some, skeptics may think, trivial. But though gamers’ contribution to toppling the global power structures will, we suspect, be modest, it is not as irrelevant as some might suppose.

Counterplay

Earth has been destroyed by war and ecological mismanagement. Humanity takes factions: the Spartan Federation (fascist militarists), Gaia’s Step-daughters (green pacifists), University of Planet (academic technocrats), Peacekeeping Forces (bureaucratic diplomats), Human Hive (state-socialists), Lord’s Believers (Christian fundamentalists), and Morgan Industries (neoliberal capitalists). Each faction races to expand its colony, selecting political structures (police state, democratic, or theocratic), economic systems (free market, planned, or green), and cultural values (prioritizing wealth, power, or knowledge). Victory—planetary hegemony—might be achieved through conquest, diplomacy, economics, transcendence (collective consciousness), or cooperation (an alliance of factions). The permutation of these choices makes Sid Meier’s 1999 Alpha Centauri among the more complex of civilization-building games. There’s no doubt that it deeply embeds some premises of what Kacper Poblocki (2002), in an analysis of the game, terms “bio-cultural imperialism.” Alpha Centauri is, after all, one of an inauspiciously named genre of “4x” games, as in eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate.

But let’s imagine a gamer, a unionized media worker—maybe a scriptwriter on strike against Hollywood’s conglomerates—also involved in the antiwar movement and ecological activism, who regularly plays Alpha Centauri. Let’s imagine she plays by forging a multitudinous alliance of Gaia’s Stepdaughters, Human Hive, and University of Planet against the imperial powers of Morgan Industries, Spartan Federation, and Lord’s Believers. This may not be an optimal gambit for winning, yet it could be both pleasurable for our gamer to try, and also virtually corroborative of her actual activism.

Games are machines of “subjectivation.” When we play an in- game avatar, we temporarily simulate, adopt, or try out certain identities. Games, like other cultural machines, hail or “interpellate” us in particular “subject positions” (Althusser 1971). These subject positions may be utterly fantastic, quite realistic, or somewhere in between. But such in-game identities are never entirely separated from the options provided by the actual social formations in which the games are set, from which their virtualities derive and into which they flow back. Game virtualities remove us from, but also prepare us for, these actual subject positions. Mostly, as we have discussed at length, they simulate the normalized subjectivities of a global capitalist order—consumer, commander, commanded, cyborg, criminal—not to mention the rapid shedding and swapping between identities that is such an important aptitude of workers in “flexible accumulation” (Harvey 1989).

Contra enthusiasts for game “empowerment,” interactivity does not mean virtual play is free from ideology; rather, it intensifies the sense of free will necessary for ideology to work really well. Players, of their own choice, rehearse socially stipulated subjectivities. The scope and substantiality of such choice vary from genre to genre, from games “on a rail” to sandbox games. Even in the most open game, it is only a range; one of our points in this book is that some games widely praised for their latitude—such as MMOs and sandbox games—are coded to constrain and channel toward imperial subject positions. Whereas the old broadcast media of industrial capital rather obviously (and often not very successfully) exhorted audiences to specific subject positions, interactive media manifest a more flexible order where users of their own initiative adopt the identities required by the system. In this sense, games are indeed exemplary media of an order that demands not just the obedience of assembly-line work but also the mandatory self-starting participation of immaterial laborers and global migrants. Empire wins only when played by multitude. But this mode of internalized media discipline, while potentially far more powerful than old-fashioned indoctrination, is also riskier. Shaping subjectivity is an ongoing process; people are exposed to various machines of socialization and contain multiple aspects, some of which may be surprisingly activated. Moreover, to be truly involving, a game often has to include some “bad” subject positions, renegade options, outlaw possibilities, even if the logic of play often tends to their being unattractive to play or unlikely to win.

In the case of our hypothetical Alpha Centauri player, the game machine is unusually aligned not with becoming a subject of Empire but with a wider process of becoming a multitudinous activist. This is an example of the process William Stephenson (1999) suggests when he asks: “What if the player elects . . . knowingly to be a Bad Subject? The power of the computer,” he argues, “can be harnessed by the skeptical, dissident player.” Here Stephenson is thinking particularly of empire-building games, like Alpha Centauri or Civilization, whose remote ancestors are the training exercises of old imperial elites, who had to know about the weaknesses of their own system and the strengths of their opponents to win global domination. The sweeping social, economic, and ecological choices of such games can be quite rich for politically dissident gaming, but it can occur in other genres, too. Declare your seventeenth-century Europa Universalis III territories republics, earning the enmity of all AI-controlled monarchies; queer your avatar’s gender in The Sims; rejecting the attractions of superior weaponry and better “shock and awe”; never play the fascists in Combat Mission.

Such game choices are what we call counterplay against Empire. That game players do not always accept the imperial option reflects a base-line capacity of “refusal.” Not only do gamers sometimes “resist the dominant messages” encoded in games of Empire, but they can also “manage from within . . . to produce alternative expressions” (Hardt and Negri 2004, 263). We don’t exaggerate the subversion of dissident play or lower the bar on what counts as political engagement: it is easy to laugh at a ludic multitude thumbing through dissent rather than taking it to the street. But let’s ditch double standards. Few political activists consider reading or watching films just time-wasting distractions. We extend the same courtesy to gaming. Just as in cinema, music, and literature ideologies are challenged, new subjectivities coalesce, and flashes of autonomy appear, so too sometimes with games. There is, however, no doubt that the scope of such expressions depends largely on the content programmed by their developers, to whom we now turn.

Dissonant Development

Given the origins of immaterial labor in the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and a gaming culture where a “rebel” stance is de rigueur to this day, it is not surprising that politically critical content does sometimes get into mainstream games. If we focus for a moment on shooters, the “evil corporation” is a standard game trope, from the Union Aerospace Corporation responsible for unleashing demonic forces in Doom to the Ultor against which you revolt in Red Faction or the Alliance conglomerate you struggle to topple in Armored Core: Last Raven. [1] Of course, this is such a commonplace in popular culture that it is almost a toothless cliché. In games as in other media, its subversive charge is usually canceled by story lines in which critique of capital comes down to a tale of bad-apple delinquency defeated by individual heroism. And this is a matter not just of plot but also of game dynamics: political reflection is eclipsed by high-intensity action, and analysis of Empire falls very fast to the imperative of getting that last sniper shot to complete your game.

In the late 1990s, however, at just about the same time as protests against global corporate power were gaining steam, this formula was elaborated in a number of “stealth” games, such as Hideo Kojima’s famous Metal Gear franchise and Warren Specter’s Deus Ex series. The play of these games emphasized guile and subterfuge as much as speed and violence, and their byzantinely complex plots revolved around the malign machinations of transnational elites and the role of high technologies, computer networks, and virtual realities in the maintenance of planetary power systems. Such games are clearly vulnerable to Fredric Jameson’s critique of “conspiracy theory” fiction in general as “a degraded attempt . . . to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system” (1992, 38), exercises in misrecognition that emphasize mysterious cabals at the expense of systemic forces. But in the context of gaming’s long domination by straightforward action narratives, the somber convolutions of these stealth games represented a sophisticated modulation in virtual play and a substantial injection of dissonant content.

Such dissident infiltration has intensified since 9/11. With books bearing subtitles like “America’s Quest for Global Dominance” topping bestseller lists (Chomsky 2003) and Michael Moore’s documentaries breaking big at the box office, so too have critical perspectives on the war on terror appeared among a handful of game developers. One example is Bad Day L.A., whose protagonist is a Hollywood-executive-turned-homeless-man protecting Los Angeles’ paranoid citizens from all manner of disaster, from meteor shower to “Mexican invasion.” The game is openly promoted as a satirical “counter message,” a “critique of America’s fear culture.” Its outspoken designer used the publicity around the game as an opportunity to criticize representations of certain ethnic identities in games (i.e., Middle Eastern) as “less than human because they are video game cannon fodder” (Totilo 2006).

Or take BlackSite: Area 51, a first-person shooter attuned to imperial blowback, war profiteering, and implosion of public trust. An infantry squad leader, you’ve been in Iraq on the hunt for weapons of mass destruction. Now you’re back home in the United States in a dustbowl Nevada town, and something monstrous is emerging from the barren state-controlled lands on its outskirts. It’s been manufactured by the U.S. government, which has been using the country’s poor as raw material for the creation of designer militarized mutants, the Reborn. An ambitious solution to the recruitment problem—but the result was unpredictable: “The enemy you’re mostly fighting is an insurgency on American soil,” says BlackSite’s designer, “but we created the enemy that we’re now sending our troops to fight, and somebody’s profiting from that” (Smith, cited in Edge 2007, 34). Again, the game’s controversial wartime content is actively promoted by the developer: “We’re getting a lot of people saying, ‘I can’t believe you’re touching this subject matter.’ And I’m like, ‘I can’t believe you’re not’” (cited in Totilo 2007).

Perhaps even more strikingly critical, and rather subtler, is the highly acclaimed 2007 shooter BioShock, created by Irrational Games. It is set in an underwater city where a utopian experiment has gone horribly wrong, leaving behind monstrous residues. But this failed experiment in social and genetic engineering is the product not of socialist planning but of capitalist hubris. As the player proceeds through the ruins of The Rapture—so the city is called—s/he discovers from diaries and audio journals that it was founded in postwar America by the libertarian Andrew Ryan (a thinly disguised Ayn Rand), who believed in the power of the free market to create an Edenic future based in unconstrained techno-industry. The dream was slowly corrupted by war, black markets, and class conflict, leaving only a decaying submarine necropolis peopled by mutant “splicers,” who had obeyed advertising exhortations to “evolve” via genetic modification, the victims of insane cosmetic surgeons obsessed with bodily perfection, and an ecological catastrophe of dying trees, rotting vegetation, and declining oxygen supplies. Despite a 1960s setting, The Rapture’s combination of free markets and fundamentalist religion is irresistibly reminiscent of early-twenty-first-century U.S. neoliberalism, making BioShock’s success a game-world sign of the fading luster of the post–Hurricane Katrina Bush regime.

That media giants find it profitable to produce games about the malignancies of capital is a symptom of the paradoxical relation of Empire and an antagonistic multitude. [2] When game magazines such as Edge (2007, 31) discuss whether creations such as BlackSite and Bioshock can both reflect on “ideology, modern geopolitics and cultures of fear” and be “unashamed balls-to-the-wall first-person shooters,” it is a sign of a shift in the political wind of game development. But the proposed answer—that success depends on imparting politics in small details “without impinging on the running and gunning”—shows the challenge such projects face in a commercial context where the domination of genre conventions means that dissident politics easily become no more than a novel twist to refresh tired formulae. In this context, it is interesting to note the boldness of one unusual mainstream game with the unequivocal title Republic: Revolution. Here the dynamics are not just “running and gunning” but the slow—even tedious—process of grassroots radical organizing to overthrow an unjust social order: ideological agitation, clandestine media, under mining the military, bankrolling the movement. . . . But note the setting: Revolution is plotted in Novistrana, a fictional post-Soviet country in eastern Europe, remnant of a former, fallen, hostile evil empire—and hence a safe site for virtual subversion. To find such frank ludic dissent against today’s capitalist Empire, we have to step away from the center of its entertainment apparatus, to the equivalent of samizdat gaming.

Tactical Games

Drill a hole into every box passing your station on the assembly line. Go home. Wait. Zip. Sit at the front desk and answer the phone, e-mails, and intercom. Go home. Wait. Zip. Transport the boxes, one by one, from the truck to the conveyor; don’t let the barking supervisor distract you. Get fired. Busk. Start over. Passage through this tedious sequence of random jobs, material and immaterial, performing rote tasks at ever-quickening pace, is facilitated by TuboFlexInc., a “staffing solutions” company whose breakthrough distance-defying tube technology permits nearly real-time transfer of employees, satisfying the requirement of the corporation of 2010 for labor to be supplied on an as-needed basis. This is TuboFlex, a small online game satirizing the hodgepodge experience of the perma-temp that arises from the corporate demand for maximum flexibility—a demand whose severity has spawned a trans-European activist movement that, linking together issues of labor and migration, is contesting the increasingly precarious conditions of social life under Empire.

Since 2000 a growing number of activist-made games—what the game theorist and indie designer Gonzalo Frasca terms “videogames of the oppressed” (2004, 90)—have circulated online. Most are preliminary experiments, but they represent the entrance of gaming into the toolbox of “tactical media” (Garcia and Lovink 1997). Made possible, like the culture of camcorder activism before it, by evolving technological know-how and lowering technology price points, tactical games mobilize the do-it-yourself digital practices that are so integral to gaming culture: the machinima making demonstrated in The French Democracy; the modding practices that enabled Escape from Woomera; the Flash authoring technologies behind TuboFlex. Tactical games connect such autonomous game-production capacities, and a small group of indie game studios trying to survive outside the orbit of the big publishers, with radical social criticism and global movements against Empire. We cited several such experiments at the beginning of this chapter. There are many more: Frasca’s September 12, showing the inevitability of so-called collateral damage in the war on terror; the famous Flash game Gulf War 2, released six months before the invasion of Iraq, presciently foretelling the consequent chaotic descent of Middle Eastern politics; the Civilization IV: Age of Empire project we mentioned in the introduction. [3] Today, those who frequent sites, such as Kongregate and Klooningames, that host free online games can find titles such as Raid Gaza, which criticizes Israel’s military strategy, Trillion Dollar Bailout, which savages CEOs saved by the state from the economic crisis they generated, and even The Truth about Game Development, which satirizes the exploitative practices of the game factory itself. But to examine the logic of tactical games, we’ll look at more productions of TuboFlex’s makers, Molleindustria.

Molleindustria is a Milanese collective of media activists whose ludic critique of pedophilia in the Catholic Church led the Italian Parliament to shut down the group’s Web site in 2007 until the game in question was removed. Operating out of a social center self-managed by and for activists, Molleindustria has developed a catalog of smart but simple online games addressing precarious labor, media concentration, queer politics, and street protest—themes that reflect the group’s immersion in the social movements of contemporary Italy. Active since 2004, these self-described “videogame detractors” emerged from a milieu crosscut by two opposing tendencies (Molleindustria, n.d.): from one side, their country’s communication system was overwhelmingly controlled by the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi; and on the other side, the nascent counterglobalization movement demonstrated the activist potential of digital media. With the slogan “Radical games against the dictatorship of entertainment,” Molleindustria has done much to add gaming to the repertoire of radical critique and to experiment with how the form of social criticism might be changed by the distinctive power of virtual play.

So, for example, Molleindustria’s McDonald’s: The Video Game turns upside down the “tycoon” game genre. Restaurant, head quarters, slaughterhouse, farmland—these four sites must be carefully managed in fluctuating market conditions. Real-time financial calculations determine the course of action. Begin on a farm, tending to matters of land, livestock, and crops. Purchase cattle and let them graze on the recently razed forest. Back at head office, command a public relations specialist to negotiate with the environmentalist threatening a campaign against the South American rain forest destruction. Get to the front line: hire another burger assembler to keep pace with the lengthening queue at the cashier, and award that slacking teller a star for model performance to ensure speedy service with a smile. Bustling business (and an isolated case of Mad Cow) has meanwhile emptied your slaughterhouse, so plump those calves with steroids and test out the new high-yielding genetically modified soy. All of this in a couple of minutes of virtual management multitasking. Motivated by research on the political economy of meat and marketing, this game puts into playable form the processes of the globalized fast-food production and consumption chain. Paolo Pedercini of Molleindustria calls it an experiment in “procedural critique” (cited in Dugan 2006). It makes its point through what behavior is allowed and rewarded, what action is required or excluded, by the game’s programming (see Bogost 2006). McDonald’s doesn’t give the gamer room for maneuver: accept the growth imperative (and the dodgy dealings it demands) or bankrupt your big business.

Molleindustria’s countersimulations are intended to invite players to reflect on the nature of “the systems that produce those events” (cited in Dugan 2006). Its most recent productions include The Free Culture Game, “a playable theory” in which the player liberates digital resources from corporate capture and releases them into a media commons, and Oligarchy, which makes the player CEO of a petro-corporation: “explore and drill around the world, corrupt politicians, stop alternative energies and increase the oil addiction” (Molleindustria, n.d.). Such tactical games are frankly didactic. Their stripped- down, graphically rudimentary production sacrifices affect for instruction. The genre teeters between brilliant ludic alienation-effects and a digital-age version of socialist realism. But for Molleindustria and other tactical game makers, constructing a politicized game culture is about more than overlaying alternative imagery in established genre conventions; as Alexander Galloway observes, building “radical action” in game culture requires the creation of “alternative algorithms” (2006, 125). Or as Pedercini says of Molleindustria: “We often claim that it is important for us not to produce games to entertain radical people, but (to make) radical games” (cited in Nitewalkz 2007). From the pamphlets printed by labor militants in the early twentieth century to the wikis maintained by network activists in the twenty-first, alternative media have cultivated oppositional intelligence: now games enter these ranks. But is the role of politicized games limited to that of agitprop? To answer this question, we must turn to some more ambitious, and more ambivalent, experiments.

Polity Simulators

Georgia Basin Futures Project is an “interactive social research” initiative by sustainable development scholars at Canada’s University of British Columbia (Robinson and Tansey 2006, 152). One of its components is inspired by Will Wright’s SimCity and SimEarth. Simulating the ecological and social makeup of Vancouver and its surrounding region, GB- QUEST invites players to set variables for regional economic development and environmental policy, ranging from taxation and air quality to land-use zoning, transportation, and unemployment. It then generates a model of what the area might look like in 2040 based on the user’s registered preferences. GB-QUEST underscores the imbrication of ecological, social, and economic factors and illuminates the complex consequences of particular actions. The game’s “backcasting” feature allows users to reset their choices until they arrive at a configuration that gets them closer to their desirable future. This platform not only logs users’ preferences regarding desirable future scenarios but could also forward them to local government to give a sense of ludic public opinion on ecological policy. The goals of the project are, the coordinators explain, to allow users “to play iteratively with the model to explore the trade-offs involved in alternate regional futures” and “to examine whether tools such as GB-QUEST can be used to create an informed constituency for social change” (Robinson and Tansey 2006, 153).

GB-QUEST is one of a range of games that we will call “polity simulators.” Involving players in issues of public policy formation, they are a subset of what have recently become known in gaming circles as “serious games.” The Serious Games Initiative is a Washington-based nonprofit organization promoting diverse social applications of gaming. Broadly referring to games as a means of learning, “serious games” has become a wildly inclusive label, spanning simulations on topics from election campaigning to health care (Laff 2007). Much in this category resembles the training games for Empire whose workplace applications we discussed in chapter 1 and whose military uses have been a persistent theme in this book. But an offshoot movement, Games for Change, is more ambiguous, encompassing social awareness minigames aiming to educate players about a variety of international political, ecological, and health crises (see Ochalla 2007). Often technically and graphically quite simple, usually playable for free online, these games also feature links to associated materials about the social issues addressed, and often include activist guides to “things to do.”

This is an increasingly crowded game subfield. Third World Farmer addresses issues of global poverty and food supply by placing the player in the position of a struggling family of African agricultural producers; Darfur Is Dying simulates life and death in a Sudanese refugee camp; Climate Challenge, based on UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change data, positions the player as EU President seeking a solution to global warming; Food Force, developed for the UN’s World Food Program, takes on famine-relief missions; Peacemaker, a commercial game simulating Middle Eastern politics, makes the gamer either the Israeli or Palestinian leader seeking a two-state solution; A Force More Powerful, developed by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, trains players in civil disobedience strategy; and Karma Tycoon, a progressive twist on business simulators, makes the player a coordinator of not-for-profit organizations.

Most of these games emerge from and reflect the concerns of civil-society agencies such as nongovernmental organizations and their sympathizers in the game industry and academia. Outside the corporate-military axis, NGOs are nevertheless often part of the apparatus of Empire, appliers of sticking-plaster solutions to its endless wars and structural catastrophes (Hardt and Negri 2000, 35–36). Serious games reflect this. Most code neoliberal assumptions: Food Force, for example, engages players with issues of global famine but never really probes the structure of the world market. Other serious games are sponsored by flagrantly hypocritical corporate philanthropy: the sustainability game, Planet Green Game, is funded by Starbucks, emblem of global monoculture, and Karma Tycoon by JPMorgan Chase, a massive investment bank implicated in the Enron accounting scandal (responsible money management is touted as one of the game’s pedagogical assets). A Force More Powerful is connected to the National Endowment for Democracy, whose projects for “revolutionary” free-market democratization of eastern Europe are supported by the U.S. Congress (Barker 2007).

But the compromised nature of many current serious games does not mean the genre lacks radical potential. Eroding the monopoly of the military-industrial complex over simulation tools, however modestly, to foster their use by ecologists, peacemakers, and urban planners, is a welcome development. While activist-made tactical games expose the catastrophic procedural logics of Empire, polity simulators can take a step toward envisaging alternative procedures. Critical discussions of deep alterations to Empire are, we believe, too often averse to the issue of planning. This is surely out of an understandable fear of the centrally planned command economies of the Soviet era. But like it or not, crises like global warming have put back on the table precisely what the unfettered market of the neoliberal era attempts to erase: massive social planning. The challenge is to explore forms of planning that escape the authoritarianism of state socialism and surpass conventional representative democracy. We think projects of counter-Empire require more attention to issues of participatory governmentality and longer-term planning—and even utopian envisioning—than many activists often allow, and that serious games with radical politics could contribute to this.

Of course, polity simulators face design challenges. Just as military simulators like Full Spectrum Warrior can proceed from spurious premises (no suicide bombers in occupied cities), making them worse than useless, so too civil-society games can embed dubious assumptions: “nonviolence always works,” “individual recycling can save the planet,” “philanthropic donations will solve poverty.” But if, as Ian Bogost (2006, 108–9) suggests, the pedagogical value of games lies in inducing a “simulation fever” in which players question the premises programming virtual (and actual) worlds, then games that allow players to edit or tweak such parameters—as in GB-QUEST—may be more politically educative that those that simply impose their own presuppositions on players. So while GB- QUEST was an academic experiment, it leaves us wondering whether such a platform could act as one tool among others for distributed, bottom-up, participatory planning around political, economic, and ecological issues affecting a locality. Asking this question, we are in good company: none other than the eminent Sims designer Will Wright, commenting on his next potential project, ponders, “If you could just get everybody to be a little bit more aware of the world around them, and how it works, and have that feed back into the course the world is taking, gaming could be an incredibly powerful mechanism for steering the system” (cited in Morgenstern 2007). We’ll come back to this question of how virtual rehearsal might be linked to a system reboot. But first we’ll take a look at another sort of virtual world building.

Self-Organized Worlds

Their world, it was announced, would be deleted; commerce decreed it no longer viable. Facing imminent erasure, three hundred residents assembled to discuss what could be done to maintain the society they had painstakingly labored to create—that was, in a real sense, collectively theirs. Apparently without recourse, they fled and settled in another land. But their former landlord had not destroyed the original territory, just left it dormant, his attention absorbed by more profitable pursuits. The evicted paid him a visit. Citing their competence, they negotiated a return, agreeing to expect little in the way of assistance; they would, as much as possible, self-organize and autocreate their society.

An actual story of a virtual event, this episode is the topic of a study by Celia Pearce (2006) investigating the “intergame immigration” of groups of players from the MMO Uru to other MMOs after the publisher pulled the plug on the game server. One proficient player guild—which had already established a rich diasporic culture within another persistent world—obtained from Cyan a transfer of control over the servers, enabling them to return to their “homeland.” The result is that “players have quite literally taken it over and made it their own, carrying it forward to a new level” (Pearce 2006, 23). That a band of itinerant gamers could squat Uru in this way testifies to the advance of what Pearce dubs “autoludic culture” (23)—or what we will refer to as self-organized virtual play, yet one more extension of do-it-yourself game culture. Following Pearce, we’ll focus on some of the multitudinous skirmishes with capital in the realm of MMOs, the digital domains substantially created by the collective efforts of their player populations.

We have already looked at the political conflicts in some corporately owned virtual worlds, with mixed conclusions. Gold farming in World of Warcraft (chapter 5) certainly showed how precarious publisher control of online populations can be, but also how transgressive player participation, driven by the basic market structuring of a world, can deepen microcommodification. In Second Life (introduction), we glanced at some instances of what Nancy Scola (2006) terms “avatar politics,” such as the IBM workers’ strike. There’s no doubt that corporate-owned MMOs can become sites of audacious online activism: to add another Second Life example, the opening of a virtual office by the Front Nationale, a French neofascist anti-immigrant political party, was given a savagely carnivalesque greeting by demonstrators displaying antiracist placards in a protest that culminated with the explosion of a “pig grenade” that washed the zone in a sea of pink (Au 2007d). So we don’t discount entirely the prospect of waging anti-imperial protest inside commercial virtual worlds. [4] But despite these outbreaks, the majority of avatar politics in mainstream MMOs seem tepid affairs, ranging from Save the Children selling virtual yaks for real money to U.S. Democratic Party politicians organizing “town halls” to support their election campaign. Virtual takeovers of “the party apparatus” (Scola 2006) sound all too much like politics as usual stepped up a notch, with virtual liberal democracy the natural complement to Second Life’s virtual market economy.

More exciting prospects, however, open up as players challenge the basic structures of corporate ownership over virtual worlds. One famous example occurred in Sony and LucasArts’ Star Wars: Galaxies. Created in 2003, the game was originally a complex virtual world emphasizing strategic choice and a deep skill system, which encouraged elaborate avatar creation. In 2005, unsatisfied with the game’s low profits, the publishers revamped it, making fundamental alterations to its architecture. The so-called New Game Enhancements, implemented like the video game equivalent of a structural adjustment program, converted Galaxies to a much simpler point-and-click combat system designed to generate frenetic firefights and attract younger players, and eliminated whole classes of characters. Many of the original players abandoned the game, forfeiting the days, weeks, and months of time invested in creating in-game identities. Not all the deserters went quietly. The Web sites they created commemorating their losses and declaring their grievances made Star Wars: Galaxies a notorious example of how not to cultivate digital community, especially since Sony’s revised game was a conspicuous failure (see Varney 2007). The episode was especially poignant given the basic trope of the Star Wars mythos—rebels versus empire—a point underlined by the name of the main dissident Web site: imperialcrackdown.com.

Legendary as this episode has become in MMO culture, it is nevertheless a long way from shaking control of virtual worlds. Another group inched slightly closer to success. In 2006 Nevrax, the French developer of the MMO Ryzom, went bankrupt. Under the banner of the Free Ryzom Campaign, a coalition of former employees, committed players, and cyberlibertarians banded together to raise money to buy out the game. These campaigners promised to rerelease Ryzom as nonproprietary “free software,” thereby enabling players to access, revise, and enhance the programming, while the hardware—the game servers—would be maintained by a nonprofit organization (BBC 2006). Despite raising $200,000 in pledges, their bid was beat out by a commercial offer. Their effort was nonetheless considered a victory by many protagonists who point out that it drew game culture closer to the Free Software Movement, which views the development of a free MMO as “a high priority project” for their movement (Free Software Foundation 2006). The Free Ryzom Campaign has since morphed into the Virtual Citizenship Association (2007), which, declaring “virtual worlds should belong to all of their players,” wants to spearhead an MMO project rooted in FLOSS principles as well as “participative democracy” in both virtual and actual places of game labor.

The next step is clearly for anticorporate players not just to dispute or defect from corporate virtual worlds but to create their own. This step has been taken. Launched in 2004, agoraXchange is the working title of an alternative MMO project devised by the political theorist Jacqueline Stevens and the game artist Natalie Bookchin, with prototype funding supported since 2007 by a grant from the University of California (Devis, n.d.). In this virtual world, the rules change. Inheritance has been deemed a mechanism sustaining class privileges over time, an obstacle to a more egalitarian society. Personal wealth left by the deceased will be directed to a transparently run international institution whose mandate is global redistribution to ensure that basic human needs for resources like clean water are met. And no longer will migrants, fleeing from oppression or seeking reunion with family, have reason to fear detainment, deportation, or worse; borders will be opened to the flow of people, not just commodities. Private property will go, too. Land will be held in the trust of the state, leased to individuals and businesses.

Stevens and Bookchin, like many others, view the MMO as a rich laboratory for experimenting with different models of social organization and for studying emergent political behavior. The game’s prescribed norms have been a topic of debate among early participants. But agoraXchange’s initiation of this discussion is, in our view, a promising multitudinous development toward deploying networked gaming technologies as a platform for planning a new social order. Instead of either embedding the premises of existing institutions or presenting an utterly fantastical scenario, the agora prototype is to be based on “a feasible alternative model for the real world and to witness, through the creative participation of its inhabitants, what that world would look like— what alliances, affinities, and conflicts might arise” (cited in Devis, n.d.).

The idea that virtual worlds might be testing grounds for actual social innovations is one that has recently gained some currency (see Castronova 2007). In 2008 the Institute of the Future, a California nonprofit organization, launched Superstruct, the “first massively multiplayer forecast game.” Set in the year 2019, it postulates that a Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) has forecast human self-destruction by the year 2042 as the result of “super-threats”: Quarantine, a result of “declining health and pandemic disease”; Ravenous, the global collapse of the world food system; Power Struggle, “as nations fight for energy supremacy and the world searches for alternative energy solutions”; Outlaw Planet, covering increased surveillance and loss of liberties; and Generation Exile, with a “massive increase in refugees” (Institute for the Future 2009). The aim is for players to collaborate, communicating not only in-game but across e-mail, blogs, and social networks to devise solutions to these problems. We don’t necessarily hold any brief for the answers Superstruct comes up with—as we’ve already indicated, the global demographics of gaming promise plenty of scope for bias. But the basic point remains: if the Pentagon and Wall Street can use virtual worlds to plan the Empire, why should communards not use them to think through their escape routes?

AgoraXchange is a virtual world influenced by the wave of writing about “life after capitalism” that accompanied the turn-of-the-millennium counterglobalization movement (Albert 2003). Superstruct is clearly informed by the current wave of concern over global warming and ecological disaster. Such experiments actualize the recent suggestion by an eminent computer scientist in the journal Science that online games enable large-scale studies of alternative governmental regimes “next to impossible in society at large,” including explorations of “how individuals can be induced to cooperate in producing public goods” (Bainbridge 2007). To look at games’ potential contribution to collective-goods production, we need, however, to examine further the involvement of games of multitude in struggles over intellectual property.

Software Commons

Online guerrilla warfare throws a massive corporate complex into crisis, brings some of its sectors to the brink of collapse, forces others to rethink their strategies, calls forth drastic countermeasures—but seems to remain undefeatable. Neither a sci-fantasy nor a radical fantasy, this is how Todd Hollenshead of id Software characterized the state of the virtual play business to a rapt audience at the Game Developers Conference in 2007 (cited in Radd 2007). He was referring, of course, to piracy. Citing the Electronic Software Association’s (ESA 2007) estimate of $3 billion annual losses by North American publishers to piracy, Hollenshead suggested that illegal copying of games was propelling the computer side of digital play to crisis. Such estimates are suspect, often making the unlikely assumption that all pirated games would otherwise be purchased at market price (Tetzalf 2000). But Hollenshead wasn’t being completely hyperbolic about “guerrilla war,” at least in regard to the counterinsurgency measures of the game industry: with pirates facing international police crackdowns, multi-million-dollar fines, and multiyear prison terms, and gamers’ hardware routinely scanned by digital rights management systems, law enforcement is ramping up in play-space.

Commercial games, like the music and film businesses, are suffering at the hands of rip-and-burn digital culture. This is a return of the repressed: the hacker knowledge that the games industry commodified bites back as new generations of consumers learn to copy and pass on the goods it makes without paying. As we saw with “nomad gamers” chipping consoles (chapter 3), piracy covers a range of practices from large-scale for-profit operations to warez networks inspired by technical challenge and anticorporate politics to small-scale game swapping. We don’t simplify or romanticize piracy. Nor are we without sympathy for independent game developers who see revenues disappearing into the black market. The game industry’s guerrilla war is, however, a symptom of new forms of networked creativity not easily or productively contained in the commodity form.

This war has generated innumerable conflicts and anomalies. For example, much of the preservation and archiving of game culture is conducted by “abandonware” sites that make available online old games that are no longer sold commercially (Costikyan 2000). All these sites are technically illegal; since U.S. copyright endures for ninety- and developers—acquired, merged, and resold—may even be unaware of, or indifferent to, their ownership of game classics and rarities. Persisting despite periodic threats of prosecution, abandonware operators, like pirate librarians of the game world, run in a legal twilight zone. Meanwhile the use of antipiracy technology has raised issues about both privacy invasion and collateral damage. A notorious case was the Starforce Digital Rights Management, whose success in degrading the performance of many players’ computers occasioned class-action suits and eventually abandonment by leading game publishers (Loughrey 2006).

Similar uncertainties hang over the creation of new content. A flashpoint is the practice of mixing content from multiple games and other media. The first known intellectual property prosecution of modders occurred when Twentieth Century Fox shut down a Quake “Aliens vs. Predator” mod. Fox became notorious for contacting mod teams, demanding they cease production, remove Web sites, surrender destroy copies, and reveal the names and addresses of members. A new term—“foxing”—entered gamers’ lexicon (Kahless 2001). But other corporations followed suit. Mods for Quake, Mario, and Mortal Kombat have been foxed to degrees from total shutdown to renaming; a recent high-profile case involves the importation of copyrighted comic-book characters into the superhero game Freedom Force. While the pattern of enforcement is highly uneven, the issue hangs as a potential damper over the creativity of both mods and machinima.

In yet other parts of the piracy battlefield, prosecutions have raised far-reaching issues about the scope of corporate control over networked software. Blizzard’s early Warcraft games were not designed for online play, but players independently created shareware to enable it. Blizzard then constructed its own proprietary multiplayer meeting place, Battlenet. A group of player-programmers promptly reverse-engineered Battlenet software and constructed an alternative network, BnetD. Blizzard sued, claiming BnetD enabled use of pirated games. BnetD’s creators said they aimed only to evade notorious Battlenet problems of crashes, slow response, and rampant cheating. They were joined as codefendants by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which argued that outlawing reverse software engineering would prevent new programs interoperating with older ones, thus allowing companies to eliminate rival products that interface with their own. Courts ruled in favor of Blizzard, in a decision widely seen as pivotal to legal regulation of new media (EFF 2005; Miller 2002; Wen 2002).

While media corporations struggle to contain digital culture within the bounds of profitability, multitudinous counterinitiatives take an opposite direction, trying to legally enlarge the domains of collective intellectual and artistic practice and expand a “knowledge commons” (Mute 2005). Two instances are the Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement and the Creative Commons initiative. FLOSS is a movement of libertarian-minded programmers voluntarily collaborating to develop operating systems and software whose source code is available for free. Legal instruments such as the GNU General Public License or other variants of what is colloquially known as copyleft permit users to copy, alter, and redistribute the software provided they allow the same freedoms to subsequent users. Although FLOSS has many internal divisions and factions, it has become a globally important counterforce against corporate lockdown on digital knowledge (Stallman 2005). Creative Commons refers to a growing set of licenses that disaggregate the prerogatives bundled together in conventional copyrights, allowing creators to permit copying with or without attribution, for commercial or noncommercial use, allowing or disallowing derivative works, in a variety of permutations (Lessig 2004). It is an alternative form of copyright, which grants users certain specified permissions regarding what people can do with your created content, rather than insisting, “all rights reserved.” Such licenses have now been applied to millions of cultural products of authors, bloggers, and musicians. While the politics of both open-source and Creative Commons licenses are ambivalent, and by no means immune to corporate co-optation, both express a deep restiveness against the corporate controls over intellectual and cultural life and are part of the intellectual property activism that one writer for the New York Times declared “the first new social movement of the century” (cited in Sunder 2006, 258).

FLOSS and Creative Commons have had only limited influence on games. The Ryzom free software initiative cited in the previous section is one example of open-source incursion, and online repositories of open-source projects such as SourceForge are littered with hundreds of game proposals, preliminary code strings, and graphics, though most range from modest to abandoned. But the Linux operating system, the most famous creation of the FLOSS community, is very rarely supported by game publishers; indeed, its inhospitability to virtual play is one of the major barriers to its wider adoption. Many of the tactical and serious games discussed earlier in this chapter carry a Creative Commons license. The control of mainstream game production by commercial publishers ensures, however, that licensing remains dominated by standard copyright and the click-through EULA, or end user licensing agreement.

Some of the more innovative game publishers have, however, attempted to assimilate these new developments. In Second Life, Linden Labs allows, in addition to the copyright bestowed on user-generated content, Creative Commons licenses (Mia Wombat 2006). More recently, Linden released the source code for the viewers that enable players to join Second Life and then, in April 2007, announced the server software would go open-source. The politics of this move are complex. As Andrew Herman and his coauthors (2006) note, Linden’s initial move giving players ownership over virtual property was in part a response to grievances about free labor in virtual worlds, but one that dealt with the issue through the very concepts of individual property ownership on which neoliberal capitalism depends. Throwing some Creative Commons and FLOSS provisions into the mix is part and parcel of Linden’s broader corporate strategy, opening access while making money off the selling and taxing of virtual property. In this sense, it is part of a wider corporate drive across the entire Internet sector to reabsorb open source as yet another way of mobilizing the coding intellect of its users (see Hardie 2006). The cutting edge of corporate game strategy thus rests on partially encouraging the very initiatives that, if they were to run “out of control,” invite anticapitalist experimentation—precisely what we would expect from the mutually entwined relation of Empire and multitude, where the issue of who is co- opting whom is chronically ambivalent

Our point, however, is not to predict a major outbreak of copyleft licensing in game culture, though the practice may well become more frequent. It is to suggest that such commons projects are symptomatic of a deep disparity between the real conditions of digital production and existing property laws (see Coleman and Dyer- Witheford 2007). Game production, like that of film, music, and all digital arts, exemplifies conditions where creativity rests on derivation from preceding works, boundaries between producers and consumers blur along a continuum, and restrictions on illegal copying and circulation can only be achieved, if at all, by deep invasions of privacy and restrictions of technological capacities. The conditions are, in short, those of highly socialized production, a de facto commons that is incompatible with stringent de jure intellectual property rights. Game culture, we would say, exemplifies practical open-source and Creative Commons practices, even though it continues to be governed by conventional intellectual property regulations. It is a practical reality of multitude, ruled by the old law of Empire. This is what makes the “war on piracy” so frustrating to both proprietors and players.

While media capital struggles to either repress or co-opt do-it-yourself digital culture, these attempts at commodification resemble a group of feudal lords trying on the eve of the industrial revolution to figure how to tithe “a newly invented power loom” (see Boyle 1996, xiv). “Dot.communist” (Barbrook 2001) practices of digital creation and circulation, not just in games but also in other fields, such as P2P, tactical media, grid computing, and microfabrication, are signs of deep tectonic shifts in the forces of production. In this view, the logic of the commons is no anachronistic remnant of fading hacker culture but a premonitory avatar of some yet-to-emerge “commonist” mode of production (see Dyer-Witheford 2002; Strangelove 2005). Such a shift would be marked by protracted crisis, in which heightened policing of intellectual property confronts expanding piracy, a proliferation of freeware and open-source programming, and the migration of much that is inventive not just in games but in digital culture at large to “autonomous zones” and “dark nets” (Bey 2003; Biddle et al. 2002). The full potential of this to reorganize social ways of making, doing, and living could only be realized in the context of a wider transformation of social relations, of the very sort Hardt and Negri suggest as the political project of the multitude.

Conclusion: Strange Contraptions

Hardt and Negri’s concept of the multitude reveals the strong presence of the radical French philosopher, psychoanalyst, and activist Félix Guattari. Indeed, in the 1980s Guattari and Negri coauthored a book whose discussion of “integrated world capitalism” anticipates the core thesis of Empire (Guattari and Negri 1990, 47–56). What distinguished Guattari and Negri’s collaboration was their emphasis on resistance, on “new machines of struggle” (110–21), on the urgent need to “think and live in another way” (131). Very near the end of his life, in 1992, Guattari (1996a) wrote an essay titled “Remaking Social Practices,” a short, whirlwind synthesis of some of his longstanding proposals for thinking and acting beyond what we now call Empire. Here, in conclusion, we note the strong affinities between some of the ideas presented in that and related texts and the games of multitude explored in this chapter. Counterplay, dissonant development, tactical games, polity simulators, self-organized worlds, and software commons are six interweaving paths of social activity remaking ludic practices.

Guattari envisaged “a new alliance with machines,” an alliance that would “join science and technology with human values” (1996a, 212, 267, 264). This requires shattering the subjectivity of what he called the “tele-spectator,” the individual reduced to a consumer “passive in front of the screen” (263). “Technological evolutions, combined with social experimentation,” would, he imagined, lead into a “post-media” era characterized by “reappropriation . . . of the use of the media” (Guattari 1996b) against the values of the market that dominate our media-machines today. With mounting ecological catastrophe and mental disorientation, Guattari described the remaking of social practices as fundamentally about “exploring the future of humanity,” even, perhaps, of “utopia” (1996a, 264). Aspects of game culture resonate strongly with this idea of a “post-media era” of liberated, self-producing subjectivities (1996b, 106–11). But Guattari was also well aware that integrated world capitalism itself invites us to participate, not vegetate, noting that it “loosen(s) up the measure of work-time” only to “practice a politics of leisure . . . all the more ‘open’ (to) better colonize it” (206). Virtual gaming is ambivalent: one face points toward the increasing corporate absorption of unpaid “playbor” to extend the life and profitability of games; the other turns towards intensifying autonomous production, with periodic but increasingly frequent flashes of conflict and outbreaks of anticorporate game activism

Yet we agree with Guattari when he advises fellow activists to “try to find a way out of the dilemma of having to choose between unyielding refusal or cynical acceptance of the situation” (1996a, 95). Our gamble on games of multitude started from the apparently negligible moment of gamers selecting anti-imperial options in play. This instance of autonomy—a voice that “defines its own coordinates” (Guattari 1996a, 96)—disrupts the manufacture of consensus, of imperial common sense. Such possibility, as we noted, usually arises from, and depends on, the algorithmic choices coded in game programming by commercial developers. The emergence within a few game studios of critical political perspectives is both a reminder that game designers, while subject to bottom-line constraints and genre conventions, do sometimes enjoy a degree of creative autonomy in their immaterial labor, and also a mark of dissensus, an act of disengagement from the cultural consensus of integrated world capitalism (Guattari 2000, 50).

But gaming alternatives that open onto truly “new universes of reference” (Guattari 2000, 50) come mainly from outside the play factory. With the post-2000 emergence of tactical games, the virtualities of digital play have for the first time been connected to actual insurgencies of social movements, in perma-temp offices, outside detention centers, within antiwar demonstrations. While tactical games have become part of the multitude’s arsenal of mediated resistance, the polity simulators of serious games, though rife with contradictions, also offer prospects for alternative forms of counterplanning and participatory governmentality. Games not only cultivate the imagination of alternative social possibilities; they also present practical tools that may be useful for its actualization. Tactical games, polity simulators, and also the self-organized worlds of MMOs all emerge as part of a wider autoludic culture in which the ability to code, change, and copy digital culture is diffusing.

Such distributed creativity reflects an emergent subjectivity equipped with impressive capacities for designing virtual worlds independently as player intelligence, creative desire, DIY design tools, and platforms for networked collaboration thread more tightly together. This is a critical part of the capacities of multitude. It shows that cognitive capitalism is paradoxically both reliant on, and the host of, a noncapitalist virtuality, that of “autonomous production” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 276; Thoburn 2001). This is exactly what we catch a glimpse of in the Uru migration and the Free Ryzom Campaign: a geographically diffuse network of intelligent agents declaring their capacity to creatively reproduce a virtual world—without the intermediary of a capitalist corporation. In a longer horizon, the project of going beyond world capitalism requires a revival of utopian imagination. Projects like agoraXchange can be understood as a counteractualization of an essential virtuality of gameplay: “an escape from particular demands and an exploration of possibilities” (Schott and Yeatman 2005, 93). They support a future-oriented optic that, Guattari stressed, is crucial if the market’s emphasis on short-term returns is to be supplanted by a different conception of time capable of preserving humanity.

But the play of multitude still remains locked inside games of Empire. The mechanism of this lockdown is an intellectual property regime that deals all the trump cards for legal control of digital innovation into corporate hands. The inadequacy of this regime to the realities of digital culture is demonstrated by the futile war on piracy, with its colossal waste of resources and inhibition of technological capacity and human creativity. This means that the full potential of self-organized culture can only be realized in a system that relaxes commodification in favor of more shared and open uses of digital resources. “Commons” is a concept that sums up many of the aspirations of the movements of the multitude for collective and democratic, rather than private and plutocratic, ownership in a variety of vital spheres: an ecological commons (of water, atmosphere, forests); a social commons (of public provisions for welfare, health, education, and so on); and, as we have suggested here, a networked commons (of access to the means of communication).

To speak of games of multitude is thus to assert that the possibilities of virtual play exceed its imperial manifestations, and that the desires of many gamers surpass marketers’ caricatures of them. Indeed, unlike the virtual-actual traffic that is characteristic of games of Empire, here we saw virtual games nourished by and nourishing the multitude. By proposing “games of multitude,” we start asking of digital play what Guattari asked of collective humanity: “How can it a compass by which to reorient itself?” (1996a, 262). His response, by “remaking social practices,” was grounded in a reading of transformations already under way. Games of multitude are, in Guattari’s conceptual terms, a “molecular revolution” involving “the effort to not miss anything that could help rebuild a new kind of struggle, a new kind of society” (1996b, 90). Not missing anything includes virtual games. “Strange contraptions, you will tell me, these machines of virtuality, these blocks of mutant percepts and affects, half-object, half-subject,” Guattari mused, perhaps (who knows?) contemplating a video game console—yet potentially, he insisted, such “strange contraptions” were “crucial instrument[s]” to “generate other ways of perceiving the world, a new face on things, and even a different turn of events” (1995, 92, 97).

Notes

[1]  The theme reappears in other genres. The Final Fantasy series exquisitely wrought RPG world of quasi-chivalric character types seems the extreme of ”spectacular” gaming. But the famous seventh game (1997) in the series revolves around a conflict between a group of disaffected youth and a multinational conglomerate, Shinra (which, translated from the Japanese means “New Rome”), a weapons-developer whose attempt to drain a universal source of “mako” energy (a clear allegory for biopower) both enables it to attain the status of world-government and cause massive ecological destruction until it is defeated by the activists.

[2] Even apparently conventional games betray some dark skepticism towards the Bush era. Consider Just Cause, released in 2006, in which we begin by guiding the parachuting Rico Rodriguez—a US-appointed Central Intelligence Agency operative—in his freefall to the lush shores of “San Esperito” on a mission to assassinate President, Salvador Mendoza, an oppressive ruler who has become a thorn in the U.S.’ side. Central to game victory is partnering with armed anti-government revolutionary forces in the mountains, and pitting the country’s oppositional factions against one another. When, finally, you approach the Presidential Palace, there is not much time to contemplate the morality of your mission, and, in any case, the mayhem you’ve fomented is too intense stop: kill, overthrow, and ‘Lead a nation to freedom!’ (Eidos 2006, 4). Standard imperialist fare? There is just enough irony in Just Cause to make it plausible to “counter-play” as critical parody of the role of the U.S. in Latin American politics, interpreting the back-story of the game as not just a jab at the contemporary rhetoric of the War on Terror, but also as a sardonic medley of a controversial history of US intervention, whose modern episodes include the US invasion of Panama in 1989 to oust erstwhile US ally, Manuel Noriega—an invasion, we remember, carried the code-named, Operation Just Cause, and also a trial run of aerial tactics deployed months later in the first Gulf War (Lindsay-Poland 2003).

[3] Two important sites for tracking and discussing tactical games are Watercooler Games, http://www.watercoolergames.org.shtml, maintained by Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca, and Selectparks, http://www.selectparks.net.

[4] In 2005 we contributed an early essay about ‘Games of Empire’ (de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford, 2005) to Flack Attack, a journal virtually published out of The Port, a community-driven space inside Second Life. Other articles in a first edition on the theme of Autonomy discussed the situation of “prosumers” (self-producing consumers) in Second Life and their need for unionizing, the position of sex-communities in virtual worlds, on the desire for voluntary submission and slavery, on the balkanization of Wikipedia, on establishing commons in the grey-zones of intellectual property law. The overall orientation of the journal was to explore the possibilities “to act critically or subversively within the framework of somebody else’s code and business strategy” in virtual worlds, with the organizers explicitly recognizing that a situation where “the user group voluntarily produce their own consumption . . . relates to the neo-marxist notion of the “social factory” in which all of life is enclosed within a logic of labor” (Goldin and Senneby 2007). Flack Attack appears to have been short lived, but the issues it raised are central to our considerations here.

Acknowledgements

“Games of Multitude” was originally published in Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games by Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Copyright 2009 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. Reproduced by permission of the University of Minnesota Press. http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/D/dyer-witheford_games.html

Authors’ Biographies

Greig de Peuter is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He is co-editor, with Mark Coté and Richard Day, of Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments Against Neoliberal Globalization (University of Toronto Press, 2007).

Email: gdepeuter at wlu.ca

Nick Dyer-Witheford is Associate Professor and Associate Dean in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. He is author of Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism (University of Illinois Press, 1999).

Email: ncdyerwi at uwo.ca

Together, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter are the co-authors of Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and, with Stephen Kline, co-authors of Digital Play: The Interaction of Culture, Technology, and Marketing (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003).

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Playing is only the half of it … With LittleBigPlanet you get a fantastic adventure AND the tools which we used to make it [--]. [Y]ou can build anything you’ve seen in the Story mode, or simply draw inspiration from it, and then create something even more complicated and grandiose! You can be a visionary. (www.littlebigplanet.com)

When the console game LittleBigPlanet (in the following abbreviated as LBP) was launched in late 2008, the marketing materials highlighted how the players could now fulfill their creative ambitions and carry out projects traditionally reserved for professional game developers. The marketing rhetoric of LBP epitomizes the recent innovation paradigms that emphasize the new roles reserved for users. In the past few years the central role of creative consumers has been noticed in various fields. As the user-centred production processes are finding their way to the core of contemporary economies, value is increasingly created between the companies and their customers. Digital games have been frequently used to illustrate the new organisational frameworks that are based on persuading users to carry out tasks and assignments not traditionally associated with them. However coined, ‘user-innovation’ (von Hippel, 2005), ‘crowdsourcing’ (Howe, 2008) or ‘pro-am revolution’ (Leadbeater and Miller, 2004), contemporary examples of this phenomena always include digital games.

A closer look at the recent open innovation manifestos reveals that the oft-cited examples come almost entirely from PC games while console games remain mostly non-existent in these texts. It is clear that PC and console games differ both in use and in the cultures they create (Taylor, 2007). Equally, the technological and economic backgrounds of the market sectors have their differences (Kerr, 2006). The underlying cause of this distinction is suggested by Jonathan Zittrain, who argues that the generativity of technologies and associated co-creative practices have recently been threatened by increasingly closed and ‘tethered’ appliances. According to Zittrain (2008: 8), the more centrally controlled devices, like game consoles, persuade ‘mainstream users away from a generative Internet that fosters innovation and disruption, to an appliancized network that incorporates some of the most powerful features of today’s Internet while greatly limiting its innovative capacity’.

The concept of LBP, a console game inherently dependent on player production, challenges the neat binary of Zittrain’s much cited argument about tethered appliances. The first set of research questions rises from this observation. What are the technical and economic constraints and affordances the console as a platform uses to position the productive activities of players? How do these differ from the forms of player production typical of PC gaming (see Sotamaa, 2007a; and Sotamaa, 2007b)? What kind of insights and new perspectives the case of LBP offers to questions Zittrain discusses?

Secondly, I outline the characteristics of player agency available for LBP players. If the game from the start invites players to co-design the game itself, then how much room there is for resistance and transformation? What would ‘illegimate player activities’ mean in this context? These questions are tightly connected to the theorisations of creation and distribution of user-created content. Banks and Deuze (2009: 422) conclude the recent discussions in a nutshell:

[M]uch work can be characterized by debates and discussions between those scholars emphasizing consumer empowerment and recognition of fandom, and those who tend to be more sceptical of the unequal power relationships that remain between a handful of media corporations and the multitude of consumers.

Furthermore, as Terranova (2000) importantly points out, it is crucial to bear in mind that the very existence of free labour rests on the dynamics of informational capitalism. The forms of this affective labour are not produced simply to the needs of the capital but they are voluntarily given. On the whole, the relations between production and consumption need to be evaluated case by case as the relations can at the same time include disruptive, exploitative and mutually beneficial elements. The case of LBP allows us to take a closer look at the negotiations between platform holders, developers and players that practically define the limits between supported and unwanted player activities.

The article begins with a short introduction to the game. The next sections analyse the contexts in which console games are traditionally played and describe some of the recent trends that have made game consoles more responsive to player production. The article then moves on to examine more closely the creative projects coming from the players. The conclusion evaluates the central findings in light of contemporary theories of co-creative production.

The Game of Many Levels

LBP is a puzzle platformer developed by the UK studio Media Molecule and launched in late October (North America) / early November (other areas) 2008. Critics acclaimed the PlayStation 3 (PS3) exclusive and, during its first year in the market, LBP received several recognised awards. While the sales figures have failed to reach the boldest forecasts, the one million unit mark was reached in five weeks, and a year and a half after the launch, a respectable 3 million copies have been sold globally [1]. A significant number of patches, expansions and downloadable content packs have been released after the launch, making LBP one of the most updated games in the history of the PS3 console. As the continuous flow of new content indicates, the game has been carefully nurtured by the platform holder Sony. However, LBP not only showcases how PS3 supports developer-driven software updates, but perhaps even more importantly, it also highlights the capabilities of the PlayStation Network in delivering and filtering player created content. The catchphrase of LBP, ‘play, create, share’, further accentuates how the appeal of the game is significantly based on the content created by the players. In the following section, I make use the slogan to further introduce the game and to connect it to the recent theoretical discussions around player production.

PLAY. In LBP, the player controls a small creature known as Sackboy / Sackgirl. The character can run, jump, hang onto objects and drag or push them. The game provides a particular aesthetic, borrowing the central mechanics from traditional platformers, but introducing a hand-made visual style seldom seen in digital games before. The merits of the game are, however, not limited to the aesthetic originality but the concept also promotes creativity and sociability in a compelling way.

CREATE. Although LBP features a set of pre-built levels for players to explore, of equal importance are the parts of the software that allow players to customise the existing levels and to create new levels of their liking. Players can personalise the appearance of their Sackboys / Sackgirls and alter the décor of the pod that operates as the main interface. Stickers collected from the levels can be plastered both onto the walls of the pod and on any surface in the levels and screenshots taken from the levels can be used to create custom stickers. Furthermore, the game includes an advanced level editor that enables players to participate in the design of the game.

As Sue Morris (2004) argues ‘neither developers nor players can be solely responsible for production of the final assemblage regarded as the game, it requires the input of both’. Media Molecule has made this visible by allowing players to familiarise themselves with the very same creation mechanic used by the studio’s professional designers. In the editor mode, the players can create new objects from scratch by starting with basic shapes and filling them with a material of their liking. These objects can be further combined with each other. A variety of strings, bolts, triggers and jets are available for connecting objects to the level and to each other. Custom objects can be saved to a library for later use and shared with the players of the level. Undoubtedly, creating a level takes more time and creativity than playing a level. The editor, however, preserves the visual style and feel of the game and also most of the accessibility experienced in gameplay. While accessible and relatively easy to use, the editor allows player-designers to create unique and complex objects by combining existing components and materials.

SHARE. While providing the players with the production tools can surely stimulate creative motivations, the easy access to the distribution may be even more important driver for user contributions in the current networked media environment (van Dijck, 2009: 43-44). In the case of LBP, the player has no need to leave the console as both creating levels and sharing them with other members of the community is carried out entirely in game. The players can also rate and tag levels created by other players. To evaluate a level, the player can choose appropriate adjectives from a list of predefined words. Players can also mark their favourite levels, stickers and decorations with “hearts”. Other players can then check the hearted items and get more information on them and their creator. The recommendation features are mostly familiar from the social networking services and other websites. However, LBP is the first time that this feature has had such integral importance in the context of a console game.

Design-wise, it is quite an achievement to implement a drag and drop editor that is entirely manipulated with the console controller and at the same time able to produce complex and compelling levels. The particular beauty of the LBP approach on creation, however, lies in the way the game integrates play and player production together. It is far from the first time a digital game is bundled with an editor. Few designers have, however, mastered the integration of the editor with the gameplay experience. In LBP, the original levels include so-called prize bubbles that players collect in order to increase their score. The “pubbles” can also contain items such as new stickers, decorations, materials and objects. In the Create mode, these objects can be used for the players’ own levels. In addition to this, the original levels also operate as a sort of tutorial for the editor. Playing through the levels helps players understand the relations between different objects and the ways of combining them. The design of different monsters and vehicles is relatively intuitive as one is already familiar with similar artefacts from playing the game. Related to this, the preface of the official Bradygames strategy guide states the following: ‘the guide you are about to read will show you all sorts of tricks to help you Play, Create and Share. I’d like you to treat the Create aspect in a similar way as the Play aspect. It should be fun and experimental’ (Smith, 2008). The book itself includes first a detailed walkthrough and then after it a guide to using the editor. The order further suggests that once the players approach the editor they are expected to be familiar with the affordances of the various objects.

Now if we briefly go back to the appeal of consoles it is clear that many people prefer to sit on a couch while playing games. While this is possible with a PC, consoles are particularly well suited for laid-back (or less laid-back) living room gaming with friends. In this respect, significant work has been done to make the LBP editor suit the console gaming situation. The editor not only preserves the visual style of the game but also borrows some other features of the game to sustain the playful mood. First of all, the player navigates the editor with her personalised sack character. Similar to the game, the tutorials need to be “played through” in full before a new set of objects is unlocked. Secondly, in addition to his narration for the tutorial of the game, British comedian Stephen Fry provides a witty voice-over for the interactive tutorials that accompany the create mode. Furthermore, the distribution scheme for player-made levels is somewhat unorthodox: instead of a conventional list or index the menu is represented as a planet and the levels are situated on its surface. Finally, after the major update in November 2009, the multiplayer action, originally reserved only for the Play mode, is also supported in the Create mode as the game now allows up to four players to use the editor together across the Internet.

To get an initial understanding of the roles traditionally reserved for console game players, the following section moves on to discuss the technical and economic contexts of console games.

Particularities of Console Gaming

Console games form the most significant segment of the games industry in terms of market share. The console market is often described as oligopoly, with the three major players responsible for platform manufacturing and also involved in software production. The competing console platforms – Microsoft Xbox360, Sony PS3 and Nintendo Wii – are proprietary, closed and non-compatible by nature (Kerr, 2006). Dissimilar to PC games that have traditionally been designed to be modifiable for corrections, the consoles have in a historical perspective rarely allowed any modifications to the code sealed in the game cartridge or disc. Due to the concentrated market structure and the particular technological composition content production has throughout the history of consoles been reserved to a limited number of developers.

Since Nintendo in the mid 1980’s launched Nintendo Entertainment System, including the 10NES lockout chip, every mainstream console system has contained a mechanism for protecting production rights (O’Donnell, 2009). This decision has allowed the platform holders to carefully guard the content itself and the number of parties capable of providing this content. Every third-party developer needs to obtain a license from the platform holder. The developers are also obliged to turn a share of their profits over to the platform holder. As a consequence, the console environment has provided very little room for players to reprogram or repurpose the machines and until recently, easy updates or modifiable content have had a marginal role in the lives of console gamers.

Over the years, various solutions, ranging from production control (production lockout mechanisms, license fees, high-priced production tools, mothballing of projects) to access control (regional lockout, digital rights management, user license agreements) have been effectively used to restrict the agency reserved for people willing to repurpose the videogame consoles and to redesign their personal experiences. Due to the platform holders’ reserved attitude on player production, the term “console mod” has until recently mostly referred either to the imaginative case customisations built by hobbyists or to the mod chips that are installed to disable the built-in limitations of the game consoles. Symptomatically, mod chip users are routinely banned from using the official online services like Xbox Live. This highlights how the technical restrictions have for long been complemented with legal threats. Players are not only tied by strict end user license agreements (EULAs) that determine the permitted uses of the software but hobbyist projects have routinely received suspension requests and cease and desist letters from the platform holders and other copyright owners. Other projects with minimal economic significance ranging from imaginative Wii Remote hacks to simple flash-based games for the console internet browsers have been mostly tolerated – but not encouraged – by the platform holders.

All in all, forms of player production have historically enjoyed little support from the console manufacturers. In the past few years, the strategies of platform holders have, however, started to change as the significance of players’ productive potentials has finally been acknowledged. The development is partly due to the success stories from the more open PC environment. It is also connected to the fact that the current generation video game consoles are powerful computers: not only do they have as much computing power as a standard PC but they are also equipped with large storage space and connected to the internet (Zittrain, 2008). The network connection has quickly extended the uses associated with videogame consoles. While the 1980’s already witnessed some experiments with downloadable console content [2], it is the late emergence of hard drives and manufacturers’ proprietary networks that has really boosted the possibilities invested in digital distribution. The console networks have both allowed easy updates for the software and created an entirely new market for downloadable games and other content. At the same time, it seems that the new features have significantly extended the number of potential console game producers.

To exemplify the recent development, we only need to take a look at the Microsoft press release from August 2006 that describes the future of console gaming in the following manner:

In the 30 years of video game development, the art of making console games has been reserved for those with big projects, big budgets and the backing of big game labels. [---] XNA Game Studio Express will democratize game development by delivering the necessary tools to hobbyists, students, indie developers and studios alike to help them bring their creative game ideas to life while nurturing game development talent, collaboration and sharing that will benefit the entire industry [3].

Strikingly similar rhetoric can be found from a Nintendo press release from the early 2008:

By reducing the barriers that make console game development prohibitively expensive, WiiWare showcases original ideas in the most democratic environment in industry history, connecting the people who make games more directly with the people who play them [4].

“Democratisation” is an ideologically loaded way to describe these new developments;Bogost (2008) points out that industry strategies – in most cases – do not deserve to be confused with self-governance and citizenship. Nevertheless, openly available tools provided by these two projects represent an aberration from the traditional policy that has seen the platform manufacturers strictly control the flow and quality of content onto their systems. While XNA and Wiiware are not primarily aimed for large player populations, but mostly for small development studios and game design students, they exemplify the new line of thinking that is gaining considerable traction and success in the console market.

While mod-savvy PC game developers realised the benefits of player-made modifications over a decade ago, developer-supported and manufacturer-acknowledged content mods on consoles are a somewhat recent entrant. As recent as 2005, the Californian game developer Tecmo sued ninjahacker.net, an online community dedicated to creating custom content and modifications for Xbox games. The community members had created their own “skins” to Tecmo titles, including Ninja Gaiden (Team Ninja, 2004), Dead or Alive 3 (Team Ninja, 2005), and Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball (Team Ninja, 2003) and used the website to swap skins and share expert information on how to change the appearance of game characters. In his telling but somewhat questionable accusation the company spokesperson stated: ‘we spent millions of dollars to develop these games, and people are coming in and changing the code to their liking, and that’s illegal’ [5]. This announcement somewhat epitomises the “old paradigm” that is based on distrust and excludes the forms of mutual co-operation between developers and players.

PC game modding, as we know it today, can be seen to originate from the genre of first-person shooters (Laukkanen, 2005). Therefore, it is no surprise that the first line of modder-friendly console games came from known FPS developers. In late 2007, Epic Games vice president Mark Rein announced a release of the very first user-created map for Epic’s (2008) Unreal Tournament 3 on PS3. Rein, known for his flamboyant rhetoric, described this as ‘the first bold step in a new era’ [6]. At the time of writing, over two years after Epic’s announcement, Ut3mod.com, the central website dedicated for PS3 mods, hosts a variety of content ranging from different kinds of maps and game types to player designed character models, weapons and vehicles. One should, however, pay attention to the fact that the relatively complex tools used for UT3 mod-making are still PC-based. In this respect, the means of production and the means of consumption are becoming differentiated. This is worth noting as traditionally the very machine running the software has also been used for modifying games. Furthermore, there is no in-game menu for downloading modification but players need to scour the dedicated websites to find the player-made projects [7].

Altogether, while the level of innovation embedded in the UT3 mods is relatively high, there are still significant obstacles with the accessibility. The same seems to apply to another FPS game that lets its players create their own content. Halo 3 (Bungie, 2007), part of the praised Halo (2001-) series, is developed by Bungie exclusively for the Xbox 360 console. The game includes a built-in map-tweaking utility called Forge. The editor allows players to open up any standard Halo 3 map and add elements from a variety of categories. The maps created in Forge can be further optimised with the extensive gametype customisation options available in Halo 3. While the editor is available in-game, the players interested in downloading player-made maps need to direct their browsers to bungie.net. Again, the access to maps is not as straightforward as one would hope as getting a custom map to your game requires finding it from the website, signing in with a Windows Live ID and linking your Windows Live ID to your Xbox Live Gamertag. While experienced FPS players may not find this too demanding, the procedure does not lend itself well to other games or inexperienced players.

Alongside with the FPS tradition, more “casual” examples of customised console content have started to emerge. The PS3 version of the trivia game Buzz! includes 5000 trivia questions on the disc and further quiz packs can be downloaded via PlayStation Network. In addition to this, players can create their own questions at Mybuzzquiz.com and share them with the community. The player-made questionnaires can be downloaded straight into the in-game menu for free. At the time of writing more than 200,000 player-made quizzes are available for the PS3 players. While the text editor for making Buzz! questionnaires is easy and quick to use players still need to use the web browser to access the editor.

So far none of the examples have provided a cycle that can be experienced entirely on console. In every case either the development of playable content or its distribution is still tied to the networked PC environment. Thus, while LBP is not the first console game with official support for player-created content, at this point the combination of an easy-to-use editor operated with the console controller and an in-game distribution scheme sets it aside as unique [8].

The Game as a Platform and a Service

In an interview conducted after the launch of the game, LBP producer Siobhan Reddy stated that Media Molecule considers the game primarily a platform [9]. This statement can be understood in two different ways. First of all, the platform metaphor can be utilised to emphasize the importance of the game’s customisable nature. The game provides not only a narrative world designed for the player to explore but as discussed, it also serves as a platform for the creative prospects of the players.

Secondly, the “game as platform” rhetoric refers to Media Molecule’s approach to season LBP experience with content familiar from other PS3 exclusives. The first major level pack made available through PlayStation Store included levels inspired by the Metal Gear Solid (Konami, 1998-) franchise. Media Molecule’s collaboration with Konami also resulted in a MGS Premium Costume Pack that allowed players to dress their Sackboys or Sackgirls as Solid Snake and other characters from the MGS world. So far the list of downloadable packs includes content for example from the following games: God of War (SCE Studios, 2005), Heavenly Sword (Ninja Theory, 2007), InFamous (Sucker Punch Productions, 2009), Killzone 2 (Guerrilla Games, 2009), LocoRoco (Japan Studio, 2006), MotorStorm (Evolution Studios, 2007), Patapon (Pyramid, 2008) and Resistance 2 (Insomniac Games, 2008) [10]. Thus, Media Molecule and Sony openly use LBP as a marketing platform. Integrating all these games, most of them exclusively developed for Sony’s consoles, with the touching and witty LBP universe provides a new kind of appeal even to the more hardcore titles. As some of the downloadable packs update the features available in the create mode, the branded content increasingly finds it way also to the levels designed by the players.

As the examples above indicate, designing the game as an updatable platform opens up room for various kinds of extensions. As a consequence, LBP hosts side by side professionally produced branded content and projects created by the players [11]. Thus, the role of players is at least twofold: on one hand they are celebrated as skilful producers and on the other hand they become addressed as an audience for Sony’s marketing purposes. As the political economists have shown decades ago, the audience is often the main commodity produced by commercial media. In other words, an important function of the media product – in our case the console game – is to assemble a group of people to whom advertisers can sell more products. Furthermore, with the advent of real-time information networks the role of users is getting increasingly diversified. As van Dijck (2009: 47) points out in relation to popular user-generated-content platforms like YouTube, the users operate both as content producers and data producers. Besides uploading their videos to the service, users at the same time provide all kinds of information concerning their behaviour and profile to the platform owners and metadata aggregators. The networked console operates somewhat similarly providing the console manufacturer with a continuous flow of data about the players. This data, ranging from buying habits to play preferences, can be further used to monitor the player and for example to personalise the marketing messages.

According to Jeremy Rifkin (2005) many companies have for some time now been actively moving away from products as fixed items and are aiming to rely entirely on ‘platforms’ that are open to upgrades and value-added services. An interview with the Media Molecule co-founder Alex Evans reveals that at Media Molecule LBP is considered ‘as much as a “service” as it is a videogame title’ [12]. There are, once again, several ways to interpret this statement. First of all, console game expansions are becoming increasingly prevalent, particularly due to the proprietary online services. As discussed, PlayStation Store has provided LBP-related additional content since the launch of the game. In this respect, the economic model is moving from a single payment towards an incremental or cyclical payment and the consumer is encouraged to be in frequent contact with the seller. Then again, business-wise, the objective behind the flow of upgrades and add-ons is not only to create some additional revenue but perhaps even more importantly to create a long-term service relationship with the customer (Stenros and Sotamaa, 2009).

Over One Million Levels Later

It was clear from the beginning of this study that a title so dramatically dependent on the player’s contributions could not be analysed before a significant number of levels had been generated. In February 2010, some 16 months after the launch of the game, Sony announced that there were over 2 million levels designed by the players of LBP. The sheer quantity and variety of player made projects provides the scope to sketch a detailed, multi-sited perspective on the game.

Importantly, Media Molecule has given up the strict focus on in-game features. The developer has provided a browser-based blueprint maker tool to facilitate the design process. This suggests that creating levels is not exactly child’s play but requires serious effort and pre-planning. The extensive quantity of player-made levels also makes finding and selecting fitting levels increasingly difficult. Related to this, the company representatives have talked about a launch a web-based portal that would help players to find other creators’ contributions and to advertise their own levels [13].

While most players appreciate the dedication of Media Molecule, the first year of the symbiosis has not been entirely without controversies. Unsurprisingly, the central source of friction has been the third party copyrights. A number of levels that have infringed on copyrighted intellectual property have been canned. The hesitancy to take any risks with the content is most probably largely up to the platform holder Sony as already the delay in the launch of the title suggests [14]. The players who have spent hours with their creations have openly expressed their dissatisfaction especially concerning the way the levels have been cut without prior notice or any explanation. The majority of the criticism coming from players has been over the lack of clearly defined criteria for what will cause a level to be deleted. Sony has promised to make these definitions clearer but also recommended players to steer clear of providing levels with inappropriate content or content that infringes on existing copyrights [15].

LBP illustrates Lev Manovich’s (2001, 258) idea of how in the case of new media it is often hard to establish the boundary between production tools and media objects. For their part, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (2003) use the term ‘transformative play’ to describe the players’ ability to appropriate the playgrounds, to innovate new tactics and to change the rules of the game. Transformative play is ‘a special case of play that occurs when the free movement of play alters the more rigid structure in which it takes shape’ (2003, 321). As discussed in this article, LBP effectively builds this transformative play into its design. Yet at the same time, LBP forces us to ask what exactly qualifies as transformative play: as level editing and object making become part of the intended use of the software, the subversive dimension of these actions are thrown into question.

Obviously players can still oppose the “correct” use of the software. There are intentionally boring or practically impossible levels. Quite a few of the published levels are also unfinished or include major inconsistencies. Furthermore, instead of creating levels for other players to enjoy, players can use them for their own personal purposes that I will discuss in detail a little later. In any case, the player production associated with LBP is not so much about hacking or reverse engineering the software but rather an anticipated use of the gaming software. Adam Arvidsson and Kjetil Sandvik (2007) suggest that in the case of digital games, agency and freedom may no more be taken as sources of resistance against the cultural industries as agency has become a pre-programmed feature of the corporate media environment in which subjectification occurs. While I agree that cultural studies need to ‘abandon the habit of equating agency and freedom with resistance and critique’ (Arvidsson and Sandvik, 102), I see no need for overtly pessimistic or gloomy conclusions.

Allowing players to create their own content is never entirely without its controversies, however, the benefits for the developer are pretty clear. The continuous flow of new LBP levels obviously improves the replay value of the game and at the same time extends the potential shelf life of the title. Following the logic of Arvidsson and Sandvik, Media Molecule’s attempt to capitalise on transformative play is solely about incorporation – about corporate power “squeezing” the fruits of game culture into its reserves. I suggest that such a position is an unnecessary oversimplification. As John Banks (2005) suggests, players are often well aware of the practices designed for exploiting their labour. As the co-operative relations between players and developers evolve, some players become experienced practitioners capable of negotiating more favourable terms for their works.

Prior to the launch of the game, Media Molecule representatives admitted that they were looking forward to recruiting some of the best designers of the player community. A year after the launch, they reported that a new level designer coming from the player community had been hired. Before this Media Molecule had already hired the team behind one fansite to build and run the official LBP community site [16]. In addition, LittleBig Planet: Game of the Year Edition (Media Molecule, 2009), was shipped with 18 player-created levels. Furthermore, even though Media Molecule and Sony have been relatively silent about the future of LBP, speculations indicate that the best player-created levels could became liable to charge at some point [17]. If the critical mass of players grows into an appropriate scale, a micropayment-based model could actually provide a basis for a mutually beneficial relationship between player-creators and the developer.

All in all, it is clear that the monetary compensations relate to a very small minority of players. This also reminds us of the fact that the availability of tools and distribution channels does not automatically turn all players into producers. In this respect, it may be useful to distinguish between different levels of participation. Following a popular rule of thumb, we can assume that a relatively little group of players has the skill and inclination to produce levels of high complexity. A much larger group of players presumably spends some time with the editor and may come up with at least one small-scale project. Then there are players who do not create levels of their own but actively follow the scene and spend time on playing, evaluating and rating the levels created by other players. Finally, there is a large population of players who occasionally download and play a player-created level or two. If we intend to understand the significance of player production to the player experience, all the different positions need to be taken into account. On the one hand, it is apparent that participation does not equal active contribution (van Dijck, 2009: 44). On the other hand, the experience of large player populations is without doubt affected by the results of voluntary level-designers.

In their article on co-creation, Banks and Sal Humphreys (2008: 402) argue that ‘the unpaid labour of the user-producers (for example the player-creators in computer games), wields its own form of power’. While this power may be different to that wielded by professional developers, this agency should not be underestimated. To further examine the powers exercised by the players, the following section considers the entirely new uses LBP players create for the game.

Producing New Uses for Games

Within the variety of player-made LBP levels, a diverse collection of projects is revealed. The atmosphere and style of the levels ranges from frisky and perky to spooky and gloomy. Some of the vehicle rides, ramps and roller coasters provide quite an adrenaline rush. At the same time, the more puzzle-like levels force players to stop and ponder their moves. Alongside obstacle courses that are similar to the official levels, the players can also choose to play, for example, a quiz or a pinball. Similar to the official downloadable content, many levels seek inspiration from other games and popular media. Remakes of classic platform games seem to be popular but influences from a wide variety of other games – Halo, Mirror’s Edge (Digital Illusions, 2008), Ico (Team Ico, 2001), and Tetris (Pazhitnov, 1984) to mention but a few – can be found as well. As if this was not enough, some player levels also include unique objects that shift the purpose of the game into something completely different. Different kinds of music-related levels form one of the visible trends among the community. Some players have created relatively complex machines that replicate the principles of a phonograph or a barrel organ. In addition, complete levels can be used for reproducing known musical pieces. The editor allows players to place triggers that activate individual sounds when the player reaches a certain point in the level. If the player meets the consecutive triggers in the right pace the sounds constitute a recognisable melody. The examples range from game theme songs to Guns N’ Roses.

The most popular player levels that have been downloaded and played hundreds of thousands of times are counterbalanced by a flock of levels that have much more subtle and mundane motivations behind them. Many players have figured out that the levels can be used to pass on personal messages like wishing happy birthday or merry Christmas. In these occasions, the game takes a communicative function and the intended audience can consists of only a few people. Related to the many uses of digital games, Ian Bogost (2008) has made an insightful comparison between today’s computer culture and the emergence of affordable and easy-to-use cameras in the turn of the 20^th century. If taking photographs was still in late 19^th century expensive and required professional expertise, the introduction of Kodak Brownie camera changed the scene significantly. The camera was relatively cheap and no dark room was needed for developing photos. Making photography widely available also produced a new kind of picture, the snapshot. A snapshot can be described as a photograph that is shot spontaneously to capture memorable moments of everyday life. As Bogost formulates: ‘snapshots value ease of capture and personal value of photographs over artistic or social value’. Now if we turn our attention to the LBP levels discussed above, interestingly similar motivations can be found behind them.

One more example of a level that may not be played by many but surely has significance to its creator is a level titled ‘Love and Marriage’. According to the YouTube entry, the designer used the level to propose his girlfriend. [18] The level actually requires the player to answer the question ‘will you marry me’ to proceed to the end of the level. The successful snapshot levels, primarily designed for audiences of one or two or ten include personal things that have a particular significance for their players. As Bogost argues, the outcome of this work is not important because it generates quality games. Instead, these levels are important as they hold meaning for their designers and their kin. In this respect, one should remember that while most of the LBP levels may not qualify as high quality games in a traditional sense, they can still very well be good games for their designers and their carefully chosen players.

One term the academic literature has recently coined to explain the dynamics of game cultures is ‘gaming capital’ (Consalvo, 2007). The term is a reworking of Bourdieu’s ‘cultural capital’ and refers to being knowledgeable and having opinions about games-related things and sharing this information with others interested in games (Bourdieu 1984, Consalvo 2007). The advantage of ‘gaming capital’ is that the concept offers a way to examine the range of player activities together. The ways of gaining gaming capital are not limited to playing games but the games-related productive activities that are appreciated in the player’s social circle can as well become sources of gaming capital (Sotamaa 2009).

Traditionally the “console gaming capital” has been mostly gained by playing and by being knowledgeable about games. In the case of LBP, gaining this flexible currency is, however, obviously not limited to mere playing but the productive inclinations can as well accumulate one’s gaming capital. In fact, in relation to LBP, the playing itself may not even be the primary route for accumulating gaming capital. The cuddly and somewhat wacky style of the game does not necessarily lend itself to a “hardcore’ audience. A look to the community websites confirms that it is not the skilled players but the imaginative levels that are celebrated. It is also worth recognising that the developer’s post-launch player support is very clearly focused to the players’ productive activities.

The reward systems recently introduced to various gaming platforms make gaming capital quantifiable and visible in new ways. LBP design follows the PS3 trophy system by rewarding players from a variety of achievements in the game. In general, developers often use the rewards to extend the replay value of the game. Rewards can also be used to direct the attention of the players to particular features of the game. Similar to many other games, LBP awards both basic level completion and various more exceptional stunts. Added to that, a variety of trophies require the player to create (customise the character, create a character, create a level etc.) and share (publish a level, tag, rate and comment other players’ levels etc.). Thus, while in most PS3 games the trophies are connected to particular in-game tasks, in the case of LBP even the trophies actively encourage players to familiarise themselves with the different levels of participation.

Interestingly, the LBP trophies also provide a basis for inventive and somewhat transformative player designs. Earning the trophies is not limited to the original levels and, therefore, in some cases the player-created levels can significantly ease the achievement of the relatively difficult trophies. For example, the trophies that require the player to travel very fast (Incredible speed trophy) or to travel very high (Incredible height trophy) can be earned in seconds with the help of player-designed rocket engines. One could say that the “trophy-heavy” levels that guarantee the player a list of trophies in a few seconds actually form a genre of their own within the player creations. Based on the discussion forums, the players interestingly disagree whether these levels should be seen as elegant exploits of the PS3 achievement system or as resources used only by the cheapest cheaters. Whatever the case, these examples highlight how the creations of players can in a very concrete way play with and redefine the dynamics of the system imposed by the industry [19].

Conclusion

Based on the observations made in this article, there are reasons to argue that the recent developments in the console market have turned the latest generation consoles into an increasingly inviting platform for different forms of player production. It is, however, worth noting that the new options available for players do not automatically make all of them active participants but instead, a variety of different roles can be identified. Alongside the small group of LBP players who dedicate a lot of time and energy on designing levels, there are a variety of players who season their experience with playing, rating, commenting and examining these levels. All these roles are important for the community but represent significantly different experiences. It seems that the basic motivations and community dynamics remain relatively similar to those familiar from PC game modding. For the especially skilled player-developers, the game provides an inviting platform to showcase their talent, earn fame and even potential recruitment. For the majority of players, the level editor is still more of a software toy that allows them to create small-scale experiments and instant social fun.

If we now return to the argument of Jonathan Zittrain concerning the “tethered” nature of the game console the result is somewhat twofold. At first glance the “freedom” and “democracy” promised for the players seems rather limited. The new openings are obviously not available for every development studio as they require very close co-operation with the platform holder. For the players the chance to create something unique includes a set of trade-offs. Even the most innovative player-made games remain available only to those who can gain access to a PS3 console and a copy of LBP. At the same time, all the player activities produce information that can be collected, stored and further utilized by the platform holder. While the potential for transformation and controversy is obviously not entirely erased, the room for altering the rigid structure defined by the platform manufacturers seems somewhat limited. At the same time, while examples like LBP do not allow radical reprogramming of the console environment they can open up more subtle ways of repurposing the console. As discussed, the player-created levels can for example turn the game into a channel of intimate communication or question the reward systems designed to direct the player behaviour. In this respect, Zittrain’s categorical division between “generative” and “tethered” seems too rigid. More nuanced and less dichotomous models are needed if we want to further understand the complexities shaping co-creative relations in the future console design space.

The people who purchase LBP Game of the Year Edition, released in autumn 2009, are invited to test the online beta of a game titled ModNation Racers (United Front Games, 2010). This PS3 exclusive kart racing game uses the very same three word slogan familiar from LBP. In this respect, there are good reasons to believe that in the following years the console gamers are more often invited to not only to play, but also to create and to share. At the same time, it is important to see behind the celebratory ethos of the console manufacturers and to pay attention to how player agency is negotiated in the different phases of the console game lifecycle.

Notes

[1] For the detailed sales figures see: http://www.vgchartz.com/swlaunch.php?game1=LittleBigPlanet%20-%20PS3[12390

[2] Early experiments include such projects as the CVC GameLine (Control Video Corporation), a cartridge for the Atari 2600 which could download games using a telephone line and PlayCable: The All Game Channel that enabled local cable operators to send Intellivision games over the wire with the TV signal

[3] http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/aug06/08-13XNAGameStudioPR.mspx

[4] http://www.nintendo.com/whatsnew/detail/3jT8hMPXjM2IaFJ0E87G7EMDyYoUtXwn

[5] http://www.securityfocus.com/news/10466?ref=rss

[6] http://utforums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=593988

[7] Somewhat confusingly, the mods cannot be downloaded straight to the PS3 hard drive but the players need to use a USB memory stick or any other external memory device that is readable by PS3.

[8] Guitar Hero: World Tour (2008), launched approximately at the same time as LBP, provides its players with somewhat similar features. The in-game “Music Studio” can be used to create player’s own tunes. The songs can be further uploaded to the GH Tunes service and after this they are available for all GH players via an in-game menu. Unlike in the case of LBP, no real effort is made to integrate the editor to the game modes and therefore for the most players the editor remains a curiosity.

[9] http://videogames.yahoo.com/news-1263292

[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LittleBigPlanet_downloadable_content_packs

[11] The situation bears some resemblance to the PC game industry in which the game engines are used to run the player-created modifications and at the same time licensed for commercial projects.

[12] http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/littlebigplanet-it-s-a-service-as-much-as-a-game

[13] http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3174332

[14] The game was originally intended for a mid-to-late October release but a problem involving a licensed song in the game’s soundtrack caused a last-minute delay in the worldwide release. Sony recalled all copies sent to retailers after audio samples from Muslim religious text the Qur’an were discovered in the game’s soundtrack. For more see: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20708

[15] http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/87394-LittleBigPlanet-Levels-Getting-Axed

[16] http://www.mediamolecule.com/2009/11/18/littlebigplanet-com-relaunches-as-a-community-site/

[17] http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3168914

[18] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf2iGG9uTZY

[19] This is particularly interesting as we remember that for example the XNA games on Xbox360 do not support achievements (the Xbox Live reward system) at all.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my colleagues at the University of Tampere for many insightful conversations during the research process. Special thanks to the two anonymous reviewers whose comments importantly helped me to sharpen the focus of the article.

Author’s  biography

Olli Sotamaa is senior research fellow in the Department of Information studies and Interactive Media, University of Tampere. He holds a PhD in media studies and has published journal articles and conference papers on various topics including computer game modding, machinima, game achievements, player-centred game design, and mobile games.

Email: Olli.Sotamaa at uta.fi

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Each generation of videogame hardware promises increasing levels of graphical realism. This provides one of the major incentives for consumers to invest in the latest technology. The ferocity with which realism has been pursued over the brief history of gaming is attested to by the sheer pace at which new techniques and methods for making games look more realistic have been developed. In a mere three or four decades we have gone from vectors and sprites to polygon models, particle effects and complex physics engines. While realism certainly isn’t the only visual style in games, it can be startling to think that titles such as Doom (iD Software, 1993) or Half-Life (Valve Software, 1998) were hailed as dangerously realistic graphical masterpieces, or that the Lara Croft of the first Tomb Raider (Core Design, 1996) was considered a sex symbol, or that Need For Speed: Special Edition (Pioneer Productions, 1996) caused jaws to drop as people watched the track whiz by at 640×480.

From the perspective of visual culture, then, this history may seem straightforwardly linear: gradual improvements have led to games becoming more and more like reality. This process is often lionised. James Newman speaks of ‘the prevalence of marketing and advertising materials that foreground the graphical prowess of specific games or the capabilities of the hardware platforms’ (2008: 46). Why is the idea of realism so prevalent? Everyone knows that games are nothing like reality and never can be. As such, ‘reality’ can’t act as a simple teleological or regulatory ideal guiding the development of realism in games. Rather, visual realism is defined against previous seminal titles, current competition, cinematic and televisual convention, expectations raised by pre-release press and the prevailing distribution of hardware throughout the potential audience. The standards of realism at any given time are, as Friedrich Kittler puts it in a different context, a highly contingent ‘compromise between engineers and sales people’ (Kittler, 1997: 33). No doubt in a few years time, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (Naughty Dog, 2009) will seem something of a period piece, but for now it’s award-winningly realistic.

If videogame realism is dazzling and flighty, unrealism is a solid and dependable. Unrealistic elements are a feature of all genres and all stages of gaming history. Icons that signify potential actions, pop-up menus, ‘heads-up displays’ (HUDs) quantifying the avatar’s status and various methods of representing the player’s own virtual body (or apparent lack thereof) are all highly unrealistic visual elements. They are also very common across all the genres of gaming. Galloway (2006: 69) argues that the first-person perspective in games tends to marginalise montage in the sense of an editorial cut in cinema. However, a broader definition of the term – one which is not restricted to a cinematic antecedent – would recognise that multiple frames of many videogames are montage. The overwhelming majority of game screens involve overlays or partitions, and gameplay often demands the dynamic navigation of multiple frames. These elements constitute moments of counterplay with regard to the realist ambitions of many videogames.

There is no doubt that videogame developers and artists have created ever-more brilliantly realist graphics and spaces, [1] but there has always been an attendant need for players to parse what they see and hear – they have to frame the action. As such, in this article I will argue that multiple frames are constitutive of rather than inimical to the way players experience space. This way of conceiving game space challenges the metaphor of the ‘magic circle’, the boundary which gamers are assumed to cross so as to experience the immersive realism of the game. Where Montola, Stenros and Waern (2009: 12-14) explore how the magic circle of play can grow, in pervasive games, as ‘Spatial Expansion’ through contractually mediated forms of play behaviour, this article proposes an opposite trajectory with specific regard to the spatial experience of videogames. By way of a close reading that discovers some surprising materialist moments in the text that gave us the term ‘magic circle’, Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1970), this article will explore how the magic circle is less a boundary into which players enter than a set of practices they adopt – a set of ‘magic frames’. Rather than being something that would disappear in the best of all virtual worlds, frames work with the various visual styles in gaming to produce ludic experience. This is even true of the realist style, which makes particularly clear how counterplay and play operate in a productive tension.

Homo Ludens in the Age of Homo Faber

One of the most influential writers on play, Johan Huizinga, read the realism contemporary with his own time as a form of counterplay. The originator of the theory of the ‘magic circle’ even went so far as to make realism one of the signs of a precipitous decline in the vital ludic aspects of culture:

The nineteenth century seems to leave little room for play…the great currents of its thought, however looked at, were all inimical to the play-factor in social life… Even art and letters… seemed to give up their age-old association with play as something not quite respectable. Realism, Naturalism, Impressionism, and the rest of that dull catalogue of literary and pictorial coteries were all emptier of the play-spirit than any  of the earlier styles had ever been… Culture ceased to be “played” (Huizinga, 1970:   218-219).

And yet, in an almost contemporary work, Walter Benjamin (2002: 127) asserts that ‘…what is lost in the withering of semblance and the decay of the aura in works of art is matched by a huge gain in the scope for play [Spiel-Raum]. This space for play is widest in film’. Meanwhile, Claude E. Shannon completed A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits (1937) and Alan Turing published ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’ (1936). [2] Steiner (1970: 15), in a trenchant introduction to the English edition of the text, notes that:

‘Even as Homo Ludens was being written, the “theory of games”, whose beginnings go back to work done by von Neumann in 1928, was on its way to becoming an intellectual discipline. Soon von Neumann and Morgenstern were to apply notions of agonistic strategy and formal rules to numerous aspects of social, economic and military behaviour… Seen in the light of The Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour, Homo Ludens, though it appeared only nine years before, seems of another age.’

These latter three seminal projects would prove decisive in the development of mathematical game theory, communications theory and computing respectively. Both Huizinga and Benjamin seem to be venturing a response in the cultural and aesthetic spheres to profound developments in the nature of both play and technology. Turing and Shannon would go on to apply their theories of computability and information to games such as chess, roulette and the stock market. Turing in fact created a chess ‘computer’. Although it was never built, it nevertheless did play a game that has been recorded through Turing simulating its moves himself – each of which took around half an hour of longhand processing. [3] In effect, this ‘paper machine’, this simulation of a simulating machine, was a set of rules about a set of rules; a game about a game; a metagame. And yet it had a curious effect on its maker. Turing writes, ‘One can produce “paper machines” for playing chess. Playing against such a machine gives a definite feeling that one is pitting one’s wits against something alive.’ [4]

This moment of modernity sees the concept of play (expressed as ‘play-room’ in both Benjamin and Huizinga) being reframed by these thinkers in response to techniques that present or address the mass in various forms – photography, film and the spectacular in visual culture; serial processing in theoretical and practical computation; the industrial mode of production and everyday urban life in economics and sociology. Huizinga thought the relation was largely negative, he ‘felt that the play-element had been on the wane in Western civilization since the eighteenth century, threatened by the drive for efficiency and the routinisation of experience it brought’ (Malaby, 2009: 210). If Huizinga describes a diminishment of play-space in traditional areas of cultural value, Benjamin ties this to a new opening in a medium of mass reproduction. Essentially, Benjamin is identifying play in what Huizinga has identified as counterplay.

Homo Ludens and Benjamin’s Artwork essay also differ in the way they deal with the status and validity of the work of art. Huizinga’s attitude is patent in his distinction between the musical arts, which rely on presence and performance (including when they are consigned to writing), and the plastic arts, which by ‘The very fact of their being bound to matter and to the limitations of form inherent in it, is enough to forbid them absolutely free play and deny them that flight into the ethereal spaces open to music and poetry’ (Huizinga, 1970: 190). Aesthetic play-room and its defining ‘magic circle’ is here opposed to the use-value of products of plastic art, as a kind of spiritual freedom that is conceived in opposition to the material.

Homo ludens is explicitly contrasted to Homo faber. [5] Even style and ornament are subject to unavoidable constraints and even plasticity has definite material limits. Unlike arts of free presence and performance such as music, material artworks are immobile from the point of view of the community. ‘A work of art, though composed, practised, or written down beforehand, only comes to life in the execution of it, that is, by being represented, or produced in the literal sense of the word – brought before a public… The absence of any public action within which the work of plastic art comes to life and is enjoyed would seem to leave no room for the play-factor’ (Huizinga, 1970: 190-191). The production of plastic art is separated from the public for which it is destined, diminishing its playfulness.

Plastic arts can be playful in nature, however, when they ‘enter the social milieu’ and become the objects of valuation and competition. This form of play is agonistic and recalls games of skill and the riddle. Free play overcomes the diligent material labour required to fashion the object only when the desire for acclaim and excellence overshadow any kind of use-value. Unfortunately, Huizinga does not directly extend his analysis to account for the effects that commodity culture has had on this conception of the relation between play and the work of art in particular. As a result we do not know directly from Homo Ludens what Huizinga thought of the ability of a technical apparatus to produce, to bring ‘before a public’. The question does in fact return, if somewhat disavowed, in a discussion of the play-element in Huizinga’s own time. Again the particular form of play in question is the agonistic, the competitive. In contrast to increasingly professionalised sports, ‘…now we come to serious business degenerating into play but still being called serious…’:

The impetus given to this agonistic principle which seems to be carrying the world back in the direction of play derives, in the main, from external factors independent of culture proper – in a word, communications, which have made intercourse of every sort so extraordinarily easy for mankind as a whole. Technology, publicity, and propaganda everywhere promote the competitive spirit and afford means of satisfying it on an unprecedented scale… The statistics of trade and production could not fail to introduce a sporting element into economic life. In consequence, there is now a sporting side to almost every triumph of commerce or technology: the highest turnover, the biggest tonnage, the fastest crossing, the greatest altitude, etc. Here a purely ludic element has, for once, got the better of utilitarian considerations… Business becomes play (Huizinga, 1970: 226-227). [6]

The mass, the statistical and the technical are found in the context of communications technology – a field in which the work of Turing, Shannon and von Neumann were all of major influence – to be playful. It is difficult to tell in this formulation whether economic life is becoming playful or play is economised, probably because Huizinga lacks the interest and the capacity to further elaborate on the matter. Steiner (1970: 15) notes the Huizinga’s distaste for psychology bars him from appreciating ‘the economics of destruction and restoration in child’s play’, and argues that although the Dutch scholar ‘cites Marcel Mauss’ epochal monograph on gifts… [he] has little acquaintance with sociology.’ Geyle (1963: 235) in his well-known characterisation of Huizinga as ‘Accuser of His Age’ goes so far as to argue that an unresolved contradiction between elitist and universal notions of culture underwrites Huizinga’s entire oeuvre. With some irony, Steiner points out that Geyl’s own critique of Huizinga is not free of its own contradictions. Huizinga’s tendency to compare the present to the cultural achievements of a historical elite certainly caused justifiable exasperation in his critics, but Geyl sometimes reads as if he fancies he himself is writing a missive from a classless society – the postwar ‘Western world’; a very paradoxical entity that for some unexplained reason does not include any of the nations that ‘had fallen under totalitarian regimes’ (1963: 235). Steiner (1970: 14) rejoins: ‘Like many “clerics” of the new liberal intelligentsia, Geyl would have it both ways. Huizinga has the courage of his pessimistic convictions.’ Geyl disapproves of Huizinga’s narrative of decline, but can only save Europe’s historical patrimony by virtue of some radical surgery to remove its Iberian, Italian and Teutonic (not to mention colonialist) malignancies.

What we can say is that in Homo Ludens play and counterplay are enfolded in a complex dialectic with mass culture as a new form of production; a spur to materialist critique. The public performance of free subjectivity Huizinga cites as fundamental to play is increasingly technological in nature, not least in terms of the very production of a mass public before which it is represented. Remarkably, for Huizinga, the ‘sporting side’ to commerce and technology makes pure multiplicities: communication is ‘intercourse of every sort’, with regards to ‘mankind as a whole’. Such competition he discerns as ludic is increasingly measured against counting, measuring and disseminating machines and the social forms contingent on them rather than other individuals assembled contemporaneously. Thus, in spite of a general increase in forms of counterplay in the cultural outlook just before the Second World War, the constitution of the ‘public action’ necessary to the play-factor comes to be centred on the apparatus. Play perseveres as a litany of shifted frames of possibility: the highest, the biggest, the fastest, the greatest.

The epochal diminishment of the ‘space for play’ lamented by Homo Ludens in the contexts of a heedless utilitarianism and modernity is ‘for once’ and on ‘an unprecedented scale’ countermanded in mass communications, technology and commerce. The play-element involved in this new space is, for Huizinga, the same that once accounted for any playfulness that is to be found in the plastic artworks of tradition, which now come to rely on esotericism. The work of art itself becomes simply an economic ghetto maintained by pure prestige and ‘esotericism’ which is playful due to the magic circle of its own jargon: ‘…esoterics requires a play-community which shall steep itself in its own mystery. Wherever there is a catch-word ending in –ism we are hot on the tracks of a play-community’ (Huizinga, 1970: 229). With regard to material works of art, then, the agonistic play-function that once operated in them instead becomes a ludic feature of technological mediation, commerce and exchange. In such a cultural climate, art must sequester itself from the play of commodities, become playfully (or perhaps coyly) esoteric rather than robustly competitive: it must maintain an aura.

Film, whether as artform or commercial product, makes no appearance in Homo Ludens. This absence is related to the manner in which Huizinga conceives plastic artworks as constrained and immobile, and his animus towards artistic movements such as Impressionism, known as it is for lavishing great attention on that enduring symbol of the transience of phenomena: weather. The Impressionists made use of mass-produced tubes of paint to leave the studio and work en plein air. [7] Thus even as it allows a new form of movement to enter painting through the impression, the production of material artwork commands as much as facilitates the movement of the artist. Nothing could have been more disturbing from the point of view of a text that advocates a view of play predicated on the free and unconstrained movement of the human being than the potential autonomy of objects – it’s remarkable enough (though generally unremarked) that a classic book on play at no point engages in a sustained discussion of toys and other material artefacts associated intimately with the ludic. We can only imagine what Huizinga may have made of Turing moving and pausing at the discretion of his ghostly chess machine, still less Pirandello’s account, quoted by Benjamin, of the situation of the actor before the cinematic apparatus – a staccato form of movement governed by the demands of shot and montage. [8]

However here too Huizinga’s formidable commitment to play as free, immaterial movement,which surprisingly discovered a play-element in mass communications technology, comes up against a limit-case:

…dancing is an anomalous position. It is musical and plastic at once: musical since rhythm and movement are its chief elements, plastic because inevitably bound to matter. Its execution depends on the human body with its limited manoeuvrability, and its beauty is that of the moving body itself. Dancing is a plastic creation like sculpture, but for a moment only. In common with the music which accompanies it and is its necessary condition, it lives from its capacity for repetition. (Huizinga, 1970: 190).

Dance – an art form devoted to the purity of gesture – appears here as the zero-point of play within matter, an indistinct and anomalous space or threshold between the two that appears in the moment and in the intimacy of the human body itself. In Homo Ludens, the apparatus achieves a new freedom that also traces the limits of ‘the human body with its limited manouevrability’. Mass communications apparatus and bodily gesture: two materialist moments of counterplay in Huizinga’s ahistorical theory of the magic circle which both exist ‘for a moment only’ but live from a ‘capacity for repetition’. To this may be added the ‘dull coterie’ of Realism, Naturalism and Impressionism whose orientation to the exigencies of the temporal and political disqualify them from play in the old sense, but for that very reason may make them in some sense paradigmatic of the new. The social aspect of production, the bringing of the work before a public, becomes a characteristic of the apparatus. In a very Benjaminian constellation, the beauty of play appears to this renowned humanist in its own passing away, but what this twilight reveals is the mode in which play survives the nineteenth century.

‘Moving cutting-off’

As such the elements of counterplay in Homo Ludens can be seen as instructive for thinking about play with communications technologies and in particular the specific topic of this article: videogames. In this light it is necessary to revisit the magic circle thesis with regard to contemporary realism such as that found in games – that is, where non-realist elements of counterplay are productive of the virtual space rather than somehow detracting from it. Such a revision would have to take into account the hints left in the wake of Huizinga: the materialities of the apparatus, the relation between the moment and repetition in dance, the paradigmatic and yet conflicted status of realism. What’s needed is a concept that can think through both the playful and the visual. As such, interrogating the function of the frame may help to mediate the two – to mod Huizinga, we might dub it the ‘magic frame’.

Why a magic frame? This particular proposal has been advanced by Pargman and Jakobsson (2008), who have questioned what they call the ‘strong boundary hypothesis’, according to which the space of play is cleanly demarcated from everyday experience. Through an ethnographic study of a group of hardcore gamers, Pargman and Jakobsson find a number of quotidian practices and attitudes to play that obviate the idea of play as a space of enchantment. Players were interested in maintaining social ties and practicing their skills and ‘While not having much to do with the “magic” of games, these kinds of incentives and pressures were a large part of what games and gaming meant to the participants’ (236). In response, the researchers draw on sociological precedent (in particular Goffman, 1986) to propose a ‘weak boundary hypothesis’ according to which players are adept at shifting their attention between different frames – play and the various quotidian situations in which they find themselves and ‘There is nothing magical about shifting between these roles’ (238). Pargman and Jakobsson go so far as to suggest that the popularity of the magic circle concept for game studies is due to the way that it flatters and makes consequential the field’s object of study. Lehdonvirta (2010) has also found an overemphasis of the magic circle metaphor in academic approaches to MMO games.

While acknowledging this work, my current interest in the term ‘magic frame’ is not  to affirm a relation between the game and everyday life, or the expansion of the magic circle to different contexts as do Montola et al. The latter contractual model is well-suited to pervasive gaming as a social form, but less so to videogames in which the problem is not simply entering a space of play, but understanding and reacting to dynamically evolving forms. Elsewhere (Jayemanne, 2005), I have recruited Bateson’s (2000) concept of metacommunication to give an example of an embodied rather than contractual engagement with play. I have also (Jayemanne, 2009) explored these issues in the context of J.L. Austin’s notion of the performative speech act and its legalist underpinnings. Austin attempts to exclude ‘parasitic’ utterances – speech acts uttered in a play or novel, for example – from his considerations on the grounds that they are merely ‘hollow and void’ representations of really binding speech acts. Austin assumes in this that parasitic utterances can be routinely distinguished from normal speech acts, but this assumes that the parasitic itself must signify in some fashion: as in the case of a frame and caption around a picture, for example. There I argued that rather than simply signifying the binary ‘parasitic/normal’, these signs can work in many different ways and thereby dynamically guide how players evaluate virtual space, arriving at a theory of image actions.

Taking up this theme in light of the materialist idea of play found in Benjamin (and the counterplay in Huizinga), it is possible to account for the role of framing in constructing the spatiality of contemporary games. Most importantly the concept of the frame brings to mind the operations of the camera made familiar by film, photography, television and video. Gameplay involves navigating virtual space through various viewpoints – the mobility of the camera is of such importance that often the first thing that alerts a player to design flaws is a shoddy camera. As Lev Manovich argues,

The incorporation of virtual camera controls into the very hardware of game consoles is truly a historic event. Directing the virtual camera becomes as important as controlling perception functions in the subject in its own right, suggesting the return of “New Vision” movement of the 1920s (Maholy-Nagy, Rodchenko, Vertov and others), which foreground the new mobility of the photo and film camera, and made unconventional points of view a key part of its poetics’ (Manovich, 2001: xii).

The counterplay in Homo Ludens also includes the microgestures (Jayemanne, 2005) by which players manipulate the camera – the minimal materialist play of dance becomes a vast Spiel-raum in counterplay. Benjamin (2002: 116) identifies this as a tactile, distracted mode of engagement more akin to an architecture than the singular frame of a painting. The regime of framing in videogames both facilitates tactile, embodied engagement and opens up space as an architecture. As such, the traversal, establishment and recognition of frames is central to the experience of play thought as an active process of manipulating temporal and spatial contexts. These frames may be realist in the sense of naturalism in FPS games, or they may be impressionistic as in the Japanese-style brushstrokes of Okami (Clover Studios, 2006).

In fact this notion of framing has a long history in visual-cultural debates. In the paper ‘Photography and Fetish’, Christian Metz (1985) locates the novelty of film in the combination of technologies which mobilised temporal and spatial frames respectively: stroboscopy and photography. Metz argues that the major innovation in animation is the control of temporal frames, whereas photography records space. In this conception, the moment framed by the photographic image allows possession of a lost time or loved one in the form of learning to love their absence, a potential it shares with the fetish as object. Meanwhile, precisely due to movement and the inclusion of sound, film is more apt to be an ‘extraordinary activator of fetishism’ (1985: 87) as practice. ‘Thanks to the principle of a moving cutting off, thanks to the changes of framing between shots (or within a shot: tracking, panning, characters moving into or out of the frame, and so forth), cinema literally plays with the terror and pleasure of fetishism…’ (1985: 88).

So here an apparatus ‘literally plays’ with movement as a moving frame. The distinction between a static moment in time which creates a photographic fetish object and a moving image which activates fetishism through constantly playing with visible and invisible spatial relations is explicitly related by Metz both to the ‘problem of off-frame space’ and a further dichotomy between private and public usage. By treating photos of deceased loved ones as the exemplary instance of the technology, Metz secures the discrete or unitary status of individual photographs – although even a photograph construed as hermetically self-sufficient may contain traces of the exclusionary function performed by its frame, which Roland Barthes (1981: 64) formulated in his concept of the punctum: an arresting feature that challenges the coherence of the image by disturbing habitual modes of reception, catching the subject in the act of looking.

This perspective is of undoubted importance, but there is another form of ‘off-frame space’ generally associated with photography in its more public functions: the caption that conveys socio-political context. Significantly in this regard, Metz (1985: 87) invokes Benjamin’s concept of the aura as regards the photograph of the loved one in terms of distance and proximity but chooses not to pursue the related notion of its decay through dissemination in mass culture in which the ‘off-frame’ space is constituted by other images whose place in a series is often indicated by caption. In the latter case, the punctum disperses the effect of the frame rather than strengthening it.

The porosity of the visual frame and the related quality of the off-frame space are negotiated both by design and by use. Metz and Barthes, by insisting on the unitary status of the photograph and the rigidity of its frame, unveil an apotropaic dimension in terms of the preservation of aura (an intense subjective investment exemplified by the image of the deceased, but also signifying a temporal continuity with the past). Conversely, independent movement of the apparatus (as well as the movement of figures off-frame at which the subject would like to look) in film leads Metz to speak of a threatening aspect in which the difference between seen and unseen is actively played with, exemplified in his reading by the horror genre in cinema and the cultural spectacle of the striptease.

Benjamin, for his part, identifies the potential for movement already in photography (and generalised as the category of ‘technical reproduction’ or in the more recent translation, simply ‘reproducibility’) due to its public ability to disseminate images and thus render porous the frames and borders experienced as continent in traditional settings. The integrity of the individual photographic frame is vulnerable to both cinematic movement and its own inherent potential for iteration: in the context of mass reproduction the defensive function that Metz identifies is lost and the aura decays – exhibition value is maximised at the expense of cult value. That is, the off-frame space is construed as a set of potential viewpoints, as a set of exhibition values structured by the potential movement of frames.

Similarly, in gaming the structure of viewpoints available to the player in a given title determine how the game is played. Any videogame is constructed to offer a set of potential viewpoints – everything that appears in one of these texts appears as a maximised exhibition value, whether it be a pre-rendered or dynamically generated background, a sprite or a 3D polygon model. Visually, the set of potential frames describes the forms of movement possible in the game. A frenetic action game such as God of War (Sony, 2005) benefits from strict control over the way the action is framed, allowing players to concentrate on their opponents without concern for losing track of their relative location, whereas in the survival horror title Resident Evil 4 (Capcom, 2004) the game thrives on keeping things unnervingly out of sight: in characters like the superhuman Wesker, even the normative human figure contains twisted organic potentials seething beneath its rendered surfaces. In both cases, an ensemble of framing techniques activate a fetishism, an intense subjective investment. Meanwhile 4X games such as Populous (Bullfrog, 1989) and Civilisation (Microprose, 1991) remained at an appropriately celestial isometric perspective, which guaranteed the uniformity of both the range and scale of the visual field. In setting the perspective, frames perform a vital function.

The presence of multiple tiers and levels that comprise the magic frames of videogames formally connects them with the notion of flow developed in Raymond Williams’ influential Television (1990) [9]. Planned flow is presented as characteristic of broadcast television, in direct contrast to the discretion of prior communicational forms in which an artistic event was experienced in its own space and time. Conversely, ‘The difference with broadcasting is not only that these events, or events resembling them, are available inside the home, by the operation of a switch. It is that the real programme that is offered is a sequence or set of alternative sequences of these and other similar events, which are then available in a single dimension and in a single operation’ (1990: 87). This dimension and operation itself owes a debt to a tradition of ‘miscellaneity’ which Williams argues can be traced to almanacs, chapbooks, magazines and the distinctive ‘jigsaw effect’ of the modern newspaper.

The form of engagement in the videogame, which tests the player’s ability to navigate multiple frames and contexts, seems to be related to (or perhaps an intensification of) televisual flow, particularly as regards the flourishing of digitalised graphics in the latter. Game players can interrupt as well as initiate flows (Apperley, 2006). In her consideration of the social aspects of virtual realities, Margaret Morse (1998: 5) establishes television as

… an interim phase in a process in which only part of the burden for the discursive maintenance and transmission of culture has been delegated to machines. Television has yet to master a full complement of pronouns in relation to the viewer: it is versed in addressing the viewer with we and you… but it is left to the genres of cyberculture to develop the full implications of the impression of being inside a virtual world… The interactive user is an I or a player in discursive space and time.

While Morse is here evaluating a considerable variety of social cues and conventions that, for example, go into making ‘news that looks like the news’ (1998: 42), Chesher (2003) has come to largely analogous conclusions within a more strictly visual-cultural framework. Taking the concept of the gaze in cinema studies as a starting point, Chesher argues that in television the viewer’s relation is more like a ‘glance’ and in videogames the player interacts through a ‘glaze’.

The metaphor of the glaze serves Chesher in three respects, referring to the manner in which players’ eyes ‘glaze over’, the strategies that games use to retain interest (a sense of ‘stickiness’) and the distorted reflections on the surface of lacquered objects. These correspond to ‘spectacular immersion, interactive agency and mimetic simulation’ respectively, which are not ‘sequential categories, but simultaneous layers’ (Chesher 2003:, online). These traits then represent a theory of some of the requirements necessary for the videogame screen to act as a magic frame and emplace the player in discursive space. Chesher elaborates the oleaginous sensation of the glaze:

Unlike the voyeurism of the cinematic gaze, the psychic relationship of the glaze is sadomasochistic. At its most basic level, the pleasure of play comes from inflicting and receiving pain within the ludostatic frame… The glaze relation is generally closer to what Laura Mulvey refers to as sadistic fetishism rather than scopophilia (the love of looking). However, there is also a strong masochistic dimension to the pleasures of glaze-play. It usually takes many failed attempts at completing difficult missions before the player finally succeeds. Failures are often more spectacular than successes… Much of the pleasure of play is in facing and cheating death. (Chesher, 2003: online)

Although Chesher’s article commits to some overextended generalisations (the treatment of the relatively distant viewpoints of RTS games is less satisfactory), the stickiness of the glaze is presented as a bivalent and fetishistic – in particular, masochistic and sadistic  – phenomenon. The screen is not a barrier but part of a game’s ‘cybernetic balance that maintains a hold over players’, one of its ‘ludostatic mechanisms’ (Chesher, 2003: online). Much has been written on the agency which games give to players, but it is equally important to consider how that agency is produced. How is the glaze maintained, and what relation does the visual have to the ‘ludostatic’?

For Chesher, the relation of the glaze incorporates certain traits traceable to cinema and television (as well as video, I would add), and Morse concurs: ‘While interactivity is often understood as “control” over machines, it could also be considered a way of inhabiting the “you” produced by the virtual address of television’ (1998: 5). In this formulation, the space that is occupied by audiences is informed by the complex and intertextual history of the media – the virtual addressee is situated by machines in such a way that they (ideally) feel comfortable with mediation. In television, this virtual address takes many forms and can range from the affable candour of the news anchor to the luminescent graphics which both signify networks and ‘constitute incipient virtual worlds.

Like the slipping and sliding of signifiers in dreams, a television spectator’s travelling point of view and a graphic symbol in motion could virtually zip and zoom past one another along the z- or depth axis of television space, anticipating the development of computer-supported immersive and interactive media… Even when the graphic space is quite flat, it serves the exercise of the power to identify or change the subject. Add depth and motion, especially as highly controlled patterns of acceleration and deceleration that suggest the operation of volition, and a logo symbol is imparted with what is intuitively a sign of an anima or soul’ (Morse, 1998: 72).

Particularly as regards televised news programmes, these forms of virtual address are designed to create a sense of immediacy, environment and situation in the viewer – a virtual reality. This is a version of Huizinga’s stipulation that the work be ‘produced’ and ‘brought before a public’. The sensation of plunging into depth innervates and activates the glaze, the spatial fetishism of videogames. Chesher correctly identifies this movement as often caught between sadism and masochism, although the concept of fetishism has a broader remit in the form of Metz’s ‘moving cutting-off’. The ‘virtual address’ in Morse’s reading of television becomes the glaze in which navigating the regime of frames is established as a practice. The apparatus and the player’s microgestures – the materialist counterplays of mass communications media and dance in Homo Ludens – innervate the space.

In this way, the magic circle is not something that players reach through, so much as something that is produced in and by their negotiation of game’s set of frames. It is interesting to speculate along these lines as to just who the real ‘space invaders’ might be. Martin Amis’ emphatically titled large format book Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict’s Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines, published in the heyday of the arcade era, figures the whole videogame phenomenon as a matter of transgressed spatial boundaries (including, as Steven Spielberg writes in his introduction, the distinction between public and domestic). In Pong, the goal was to prevent the ball from leaving the frame. In many other early games, such as Pac Man (Namco, 1980) and Donkey Kong (Nintendo, 1982) the frame was extant as the labyrinth through which the player’s character moved, but under certain conditions (wraparound gates in the former, summiting the first screen in the latter), the spatial relations could be reconfigured. As in Morse’s reading of movement along the z-axis and Metz’s ascription of a ‘moving cutting-off’ to the film camera, the serial establishment and rupturing of frames constitutes a sense of spatiality and related agency as well as the depth sensation of the glaze.

Defender (Williams Electronics, 1980) was a groundbreaking game in many ways, particularly in terms of spatiality. Where most earlier games had been confined to the pragmatic limits of the screen, Defender not only introduced spaces beyond the immediate frame by scrolling across a simulated landscape, but presented a map (the ‘Scanner’) locating the current position of the player’s vessel, humans in need of the titular defending and enemy assets within the overall level. ‘The Scanner is a brilliant innovation: in effect, it means that you are playing on a screen nine or ten feet wide’ (Amis, 1982: 59). The Scanner in this game consisted of a strip running across the top of the screen – a separate frame which also contained status information: the number of lives, auxiliary weapons and score. Games such as Pac Man, Space Invaders and Asteroids (Atari, 1979) also utilised a separate area of the display for scoring, but in these cases the ‘off-frame’ space is the abstraction of accumulated points (essentially, a temporal measure of success or survival). In Defender the off-frame space is integrated in a manner that dynamically generates the gameplay. ‘Using the Scanner, you can police the entire battle area; you can go looking for trouble or you can, for a time, avoid it. In really fast and desperate play you look at the Scanner more than you look at the screen… there are long-term strategic matters to consider right from the start’ (Amis, 1982: 59).

To crib a military distinction between strategy and tactics, in games in which the off-frame space is accounted for solely by the abstraction of points, tactical play within one screen is all that matters as the only strategy is accumulation. With Defender and the Scanner players must be aware of the tactical situation on the immediate screen as well as the strategic context of the level as a whole. This relation between two frames of reference made the game ‘perhaps the most thrilling, sinister and tortuous [sic] yet devised’ (Amis, 1982: 58). Amis, at the most feverish moments, watches the Scanner space in a way that a player would never concentrate on the score in Space Invaders. An off-frame space that was an abstracted quantity in the latter game takes on qualitative significance. The successful Defender must be able to track and act upon multiply framed visual contexts at once, must maintain an intimate relation with the off-frame space. An innovation in the use of frames transformed the gaming experience both temporally and spatially.

Another example of the effects of framing can be seen by comparing two games in the same series: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (Bethesda Games Studios, 2002) and the sequel TES IV: Oblivion (Bethesda Games Studios, 2006). Both of these games involve ‘sandbox’ gameplay in vastly expansive worlds – that is, their design emphasises the lack of overt narrative or ludic framing in favour of a sense of player freedom. Both games face a problem of orienting the player within such spaces. Often completing a given quest involves travelling to a particular locale and dealing with the inhabitants in some fashion. Where Morrowind largely left the navigational duties up to the player’s own industry, Oblivion introduced two new ways of framing the game space: fast travel between locales and a ‘Quest Marker’ that orients the player to the next leg of whatever quest they happen to be on by placing a red indicator on the on-screen compass.

While these developments have ameliorated the tendency of Morrowind players to get lost and frustrated as to how to proceed (especially in light of the scattered journal system in which objectives were recorded), the ability to snap between locations can make the sheer size of the Oblivion game world seem modest by comparison. Similarly, the compass indicator reduces the incentive to spatial exploration given that players are given the most direct way to their destination. As such, some experienced players have interpreted this and other changes as a simplification of the series from sophisticated PC titles to more casual console-oriented fare. These player’s weren’t shy about expressing their opinions [10] and as a result, the developers included an Easter Egg character in Oblivion who offered sarcastic and thinly veiled commentary on the changes. The character M’Aiq (member of a feline fantasy race who tend to speak of themselves in the third person) will sometimes comment obliquely on the Fast Travel option, ‘So much easier to get around these days. Not like the old days. Too much walking. Of course, nothing stops M’Aiq from walking around when he wants’. As to the compass, ‘M’Aiq is glad he has a compass. Makes it easy to find things. Much better than wandering around like a fool.’

Fast Travel, unless players consciously choose to ignore it (a determinate spatial practice in and of itself), re-punctuates the movement into the z-axis that Morse credits with a particularly evocative potency, modifying the quality of the ludostatic glaze. Similarly, the compass marker can make NPCs who ask the player to help find a lost artefact or gather some nearby herbs seem downright lazy: the apparent size of the Oblivion game world, which in terms of sheer virtual real estate might is large by videogame standards, is compressed by the lack of a need to wander through it. There is, for some players, a perceived affront to the eloquence and simplicity of the gesture of walking through space that characterised the earlier title. Whether individual players happen to find Morrowind or Oblivion more compelling, from an academic perspective this example indicates how different ways of framing movement engender different experiences of spatiality, even within titles of the same game series. What may be viewed as counterplay from a strictly realist perspective is in fact productive.

If Defender indicates the capacity of a ‘moving-cutting-off’ to construct an expansive 2D off-frame spatiality, the two Elder Scrolls games show that the practices of framing can also have important effects in more contemporary 3D game environments. As punctuations, frames produce the experience of depth, embodiment and space. The off-frame space of a game such as Defender is folded in on itself as the field of vision is identified with the movement of the avatar. Benjamin (2002: 116) argues that the movement of frames (montage techniques) engenders a tactile and distracted mode of engagement distinct from traditional notions of optical and contemplative reception. This allows an illuminating approach to forms of non-realist repetition in 3D games: recurring NPCs, textures and other models. Many games which trumpet their realist intentions send the player off to kill dozens of identical enemies, through kilometres of eerily similar terrain or a copse composed of repetitions of the same tree. If players were primarily adopting a contemplative, optical assessment of these elements as if they were leisurely entering a magic circle to soberly compare its contents to reality, no doubt some immensely popular games would be found wanting. However if the primary mode of engagement is a distracted and tactile one where these elements are not evaluated semiotically in their own right but passed over like as Morse puts it ‘the slipping and sliding of signifiers in dreams’. Each sign’s individual meaning is subordinated to its potentials for repetition: the way it signifies off-frame space and thus frames the ‘moving-cutting-off’ of gameplay.

Attending to regimes of framing can help examine how games construct spatial experience, raising certain questions: how does a game construct its off-frame space? How does it create its form of virtual address and maintain its ludostatic glaze? This attitude enjoins us not to see the magic circle as an enclosing so much as a set of practices that open up the many forms of spatiality in videogames. And in fact, perhaps we aren’t so far from Huizinga as all that. If he did envisage a magic circle in which culture-as-play stood separate from utilitarian and economic considerations, it was not through a lack of awareness of the precariousness and contingency of such operations. For Huizinga culture was the culture of the elite, and so by definition he took to task what he saw as modernity’s grievous category errors. What he saw was a change in the way that play was produced, ‘brought before a public’, and his reflections on this change are incisive regardless of his moral evaluation thereof.

Geyl (1963: 238), even in pleading the case for the defence against Huizinga’s accusations, notes that Homo Ludens ‘could only spring from an unusual mind equipped with a tireless curiosity about the phenomena of life’ – that is, a recognition of the need to attend to determinate practices and resist the urge to systematise. In Geyl’s (254) view, this was a contradiction Huizinga arrived at early in his career and never overcame (or perhaps had much invested in never facing squarely). Systemic speculations are indeed behind the more ridiculous sections of Homo Ludens; erudite attention to particular practices animate the most beautiful. The magic circle (which in this context probably has more to do with medieval alchemy than Pong) is only one set of such practices, ‘The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc, are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain’ (Huizinga, 1944: 23). Huizinga, as previously noted, is for all his discomfiture at modern forms of power, primarily interested in the production of both artworks and social groups. By attending to these special rules and just how they obtain it is possible to advance on the materialist moments of counterplay in Huizinga’s Homo Ludens and address how videogames create, if not exactly the ‘best’, the variety of all possible virtual worlds.

Notes

[1] Montola et al. also discuss ‘Temporal Extension’ and ‘Social Extension’ through their contractual model of the magic circle. Although videogames are subject to many forms of temporal framing (level breaks, cutscenes, save game structures to name just a few), due to length concerns, this discussion will focus on spatiality.

[2] Kittler calls this ‘…probably the most consequential Master’s thesis ever written…’ (Kittler, 1997: 153).

[3] The game can be found at http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1356927. Turing collaborated with D.G. Champernowne on his paper machine. The computer lost, incidentally.

[4] Evans and Robertson (1968).

[5] Homo Faber by Max Frisch (1961) concerns a technocratic man of science who believes that apparent repetitions are not miraculous but merely highly statistically unlikely. Faber however suffers through a vanishingly probable repetition of his own, a love affair with has devastating consequences.

[6] There seems to be a contradiction here between Huizinga’s treatment of sport and commerce. He maintains in Homo Ludens, citing the increased prevalence of the ‘player’ over the ‘gentleman’, that increased professionalisation of sports reduces the play-spirit inherent in such activity. It is unclear why professional competition and the use of technology to record and disseminate elite results does not render sport more playful in the agonistic sense as it does in commerce, unless perhaps the agon is itself a relatively devalued form of play – and yet for all that, perhaps the only one to survive into modernity. As the discussions of sport and communications are juxtaposed in the text, it is possible to infer that Huizinga believes that in modernity, the agonistic is detrimental to play in traditional forms even as it opens up the possibility in heretofore ‘serious’ activities. The latter are playful because the agonistic goals can be chosen freely, in defiance of use-values or material considerations, while the agon appears as a demand, a use-value, in the institutionalisation and rationalisation of sport.

[7] ‘Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready made products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are “ready-mades aided” and also works of assemblage.’ – Marcel Duchamp, Talk delivered at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 19, 1961.

[8] ‘“The film actor,” Pirandello writes, “feels as if exiled. Exiled not only from the stage but from his own person. With a vague unease, he senses an inexplicable void, stemming form the fact that his body has lost its substance, that he has been volatilised, stripped of his reality, his life, his voice, the noises he makes when moving about, and has been turned into a mute image that flickers for a moment on the screen, then vanishes into silence… The little apparatus will play with his shadow before the audience, and he himself must be content to play before the apparatus.”’ (Benjamin, 2002: 112).

[9] Csikszentmihalyi in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990). The former applies to television as a medium of multiple framings, while the latter is a psychological theory.

[10] Some players have set out their grievances at length. See for example the aptly titled “Why Oblivion Sucks”: http://sites.google.com/site/damicat/

Author’s Biography

Darshana Jayemanne researches and writes on videogame aesthetics. He is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne.

Email: escapismvelocity@gmail.com

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Videogames tend to channel their players down spatial and behavioral paths.  The virtual worlds of games are constructions and, as such, they necessarily have ultimate boundaries. The internal boundaries and barriers of games work to contain players in certain ways. Depending on one’s perspective, these barriers either offer the player guidance about how to reach goals or encourage passivity, stifling a player’s desire to explore, and thus to discover more about the constitution of, game worlds. Games, and especially games that seem to promise their players relative freedom of movement, are often criticised for their excessively linear construction. To play within such a framework is to enact a series of movements and decisions that has been set up by the creators of the game, to engage with games as sites for structured play and for the fulfillment of narrative arcs.

Sometimes, though, a player will stray from the path described by a game, moving into new spaces, developing new possible modes of interaction, and often discovering the rougher edges of the game world, where physics models break down, textures become incongruous, and the pieces don’t quite fit together. Gameplay that seeks out these spaces and these phenomena, that searches for such clues to the underlying construction of the virtual environment, is a kind of virtual-world naturalism, at once a return to an investigative urge that has been subsumed to the exhaustive mapping and description of the real world and a form of resistance to the very idea of pre-defined paths of action, of externally imposed limits, in virtual worlds as well as in our own.

Any game overtly affords its players some freedoms of action and not others. It is this selective limitation, necessitated by the limits of technology, that distinguishes a game from something more like a life-simulation. Complete freedom would be unsuitably chaotic to the nature of gameplay; the limitations imposed by a game facilitate its thematic content and allow players to react to its challenges in systematic ways. Virtual-world naturalism is a form of counterplay that remakes a game, in a more free-form, exploratory way, out of its own raw materials. In so doing, it highlights some of the ‘natural’ properties of, and the design decisions behind, those materials.

By ‘naturalism’, in this sense, I mean both an activity and an attitude of approach to action. It is the orientation and the vocation of a naturalist, in the most identity-based sense of that term, a personal philosophy of ‘Nature first, then theory. Or, better, Nature and theory closely intertwined while you throw all your intellectual capital at the subject’ (Wilson, 1994: 191). This is the pervasive curiosity about, and the drive to explore, one’s surroundings that gave rise to the discipline of natural history and that, in the 19th and 20th centuries, effected enormous changes in our understanding of the constitution and the origin of the world in which we live.

The Decline and Rise of Naturalism

2009 saw the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, in which Darwin infers, from his far-flung voyages in and observations of the natural world, many of the bases of a theory of evolution that persists to this day. It had been over 100 years, also, since the popular discovery of Gregor Mendel’s 1866 paper on genetics, ‘Experiments on Plant Hybridization’, republished in 1900, had turned biology decisively inward, to a consideration of smaller structures in the organism, as well as indoors, into laboratories and away from the naturalist pursuits that had largely characterised the discipline until that time. Natural history was in decline, in fact, across many disciplines in the 20th century. Geography, having explored and mapped the physical world in somewhat exhaustive detail, moved toward a consideration of cognitive and cultural relationships to physical spaces, or of spatial epistemology.  Physics, since Max Planck’s development, also around 1900, of quantum theory, had been chiefly occupied with observations of and calculations about low-level events.

The unaided senses have been largely left behind as observational, cartographic, and descriptive tools; technologies are more closely tied than ever before to our ability to describe the world. Microscopes and telescopes extend our sense of sight and the range of our perceptive capacity. Powerful imaging devices allow us to observe the inner workings of the human body, from precise information about the extent of a knee injury to visualisation of patterns of activation in the neural pathways of the brain. Computers sequence genes in huge numbers and give us models of behavior, motion, and thought that reveal patterns previously beyond our ken. A proliferation of surveillance cameras allows us, for better or for worse, to reconstruct events in the past with a previously unthinkable degree of accuracy. Such tools are extensions of individual power and, it has been argued, they are inseparable from our understanding of who we are and what we can do.  ‘Consider’, writes Aldous Huxley,

The change in his being which the scientist is able to induce mechanically by means of his instruments. Equipped with a spectroscope and a sixty-inch reflector an astronomer becomes, so far as eyesight is concerned, a superhuman creature; and, as we should naturally expect, the knowledge possessed by this superhuman creature is very different, both in quantity and in quality, from that which can be acquired by a stargazer with unmodified, merely human eyes (Huxley, 1958: 9).

This ‘superhuman creature’ has become not only the source of cultural knowledge but also the arbiter of what is ‘worth’ knowing. Bodily engagement of the physical world has been all but replaced by technological scrutiny of its structures and patterns, on scales large and small. As direct sensory exploration has declined, a kind of methodological control has set in; an implication of the claim that there is nothing left to see is that it is not worth bothering to look. This leads to both a unidirectionality of vision, with the public being looked at but not being encouraged, by and large, to look back, and to an internalised, self-imposed restriction of access to both spaces and behavior. Encouraged along a path and rewarded for being in the ‘right’ places and doing certain things at certain times, one might understandably continue along that path, unquestioningly, until one day that path becomes the whole conceivable world.

This begins to explain why so many modern forms of personal, identity-based resistance involve exploration of physical space, and especially of ‘off-limits’ urban or developed spaces. Graffiti artists, traceurs, urban exploratory photographers, skateboarders, and political demonstrators occupying restricted spaces gain their transgressive power in part from ignoring just such ‘paths’ and allowing for a rediscovery of the investigative urge, the naturalist impetus to cross into unseen spaces and to thereby not only map physical spaces, but also to lay bare the organising principles behind those spaces. For some naturalists, such investigations were a way to look for evidence of divine intent; for others, they were a way to look for naturally-occurring structure in order to facilitate thought about the laws governing the behavior of matter. For the modern, transgressive urban explorer, they represent a window into the obscure, institutional, intentional structures that construct the spaces we occupy, the paths we are encouraged to follow, the patterns of behavior we are rewarded for adopting. The revelation of such structures denaturalises their product, reminding us of the possibility of other ways of doing, other ways of being, other ways of moving. ‘Our nature is movement’, writes Pascal (1965: 34), ‘complete repose is death’ .Partial repose, one might add, is partial death; to unquestioningly accept spatial restrictions is to sacrifice part of what makes us alive.

Virtual Worlds

Some of the very technologies that have facilitated increasingly microscopic scrutiny of the natural world (lenses, microprocessors, visualisation tools) have also given rise to new, fictional worlds. Film, so powerful at documenting events, is also effective, through assemblages of shots and moving of the camera, at creating the impression of seamlessly unified diegeses. Computers, which can quantify, look for patterns in, and model aspects of the natural world, are also platforms for navigable, automatically-reactive fictional spaces in which objects persist, optical points of view are relative, and events unfold in diachronic time and in chains of cause-effect relationships. A key difference between virtual worlds and the real world, of course, is that virtual worlds have been conceived of by human minds and designed by human hands. Their spaces and textures, their raw physical materials, their built and ‘natural’ environments, their physics, their cause-effect structures, the behavior of their objects and inhabitants, their manifest rules, and their societal laws are all products of conscious design decisions, each made with the cumulative effects of all of these decisions in mind.

Since the 1970s, such virtual worlds have proliferated. The popularity of arcade video games in the late 1970s, and of home video game consoles since the early 1980s, has given rise to uncountable virtual worlds of varying complexity and detail. An early game as simple as Pac-Man (Midway, 1980), with its single-screen world and its simple object and character behavior patterns, can give rise to a compellingly complex perceptual experience. The gameplay of Galaxian (Midway, 1979) takes place in a single-screen environment, in which the player’s spaceship battles a squadron of enemy ships approaching from above. The background of Galaxian is a star field; the gameplay occurs on a single plane in the depth represented onscreen. The orientation of the gameplay strongly implies something below the screen being protected; that is to say, planet Earth. Both Pac-Man and Galaxian create virtual worlds with simple graphical means and a paucity, by contemporary standards, of processing power, and yet their representations of those worlds manage to imply larger causal, psychological, and physical structures at work. Especially in earlier games like these, those forces tend to be left implicit. As games have become more representationally complex, character psychologies, object behaviors, and physical boundaries have become more overt.

With this increased complexity of representation has come an increasing range of ways in which the games can be navigated. Roger Caillois makes a valuable distinction between ludus, or regimented, planned, rule-governed play, and paidia, or free, investigative, and improvisational play (2001/1961: 27). Virtual-world naturalism is a turn from ludus – from the local and global structuring factors of the game – to an ad-hoc paidiac form of engagement with the same texts. This way of playing represents a transformation and a de-structuring of the game.  Many recent games, the Grand Theft Auto series (DMA Design/Rockstar Game, 1997-) being perhaps the most-cited example, have pursued an ‘open-world’ style of gameplay in which players are allowed to roam the game space without dictated goals, but this ‘structureless’ format is still, in fact, quite structured; players must perform a particular series of actions in order to progress through the game’s narrative, and the ‘random’ events that give rise to the ‘open’ world are, in fact, not random at all but rather designed to seem random. If anything, complexly emergent representational structures such as those that underlie Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar Games, 2008) only seem to encourage more intense ‘naturalist’ play, as gamers try to gain access to the off-limits areas, and to the constitutional secrets, of the games. If a certain desirable vehicle tends to appear at a particular time in a particular place, for instance, this tendency will soon be noted and capitalised upon by players, possible loss of diegetic verisimilitude notwithstanding.

This is an instantiation of a human tendency to investigate the salient properties of the environment, a tendency that has weathered the proliferation of technology and the rise of the built environment, and is now extended to the navigation and consideration of virtual worlds. As Edward O. Wilson (1993: 31-32) writes, ‘when human beings remove themselves from the natural environment, [instincts] persist from generation to generation, atrophied and fitfully manifested in the artificial new environments into which technology has catapulted humanity’.  A naturalist engagement with the material world persists, despite the overwhelming displacement of natural processes. In virtual worlds, the only ‘natural processes’ we encounter are the products of design decisions; naturalists of the virtual world seek out not only patterns and structures, but clues to the decisions behind those structures. They are at once engaging an environment and subverting an illusion. This is counterplay.

Virtual-World Naturalism

As videogames have grown more complex and their worlds have expanded, the possibilities for exploration of those worlds have grown. This has led to a widespread call for larger worlds for games (tempered by aversion to the functional inconveniences that too-large worlds might entail for players) as well as to time-honored player fetishes such as hidden rooms and items (‘collectibles’) and Easter eggs, often placed in games by developers to encourage players to spend more time in the worlds of their games, to ‘bond’ with their fictions through extended exposure to the spaces in which they take place.  In many gaming cultures, there is value placed on ‘getting 100 percent’ – that is, finding all of the possible items and power-ups in a game, completing the storyline and all of the side quests, and so on. Beyond even this, many players find themselves compelled to look for secrets in games: places to which the primary narrative doesn’t lead the player, areas to which it is difficult to gain access, glitches in the game that allow for unexpected enactive possibilities.

Richard Bartle, in his taxonomy of players of Multi-User Dungeon games, identifies a kind of player he calls the ‘explorer’. Explorers, writes Bartle (1996), ‘delight in having the game expose its internal machinations to them. They try progressively esoteric actions in wild, out-of-the-way places, looking for interesting features (i.e. bugs) and figuring out how things work’. In the rule-governed virtual environments of games, we can see the naturalist / cartographic urge to exploration playing out. As Bartle’s explorers experiment with the input-output parameters of text-based MUDs, virtual-world naturalists seek out and push the behavioral and especially the physical limits of the virtual worlds of games, often seemingly transcending the boundaries of these realities and in the process doing something that may well prove to be impossible in the real world: delineating the structures that underlie reality. In so doing, they reverse-engineer these worlds from within, exposing the representational logics, the assumptions, and the systems of control behind them.

Henry Jenkins (2005: 182) has argued that ‘expansion of capacity’ – the feeling that one has been given the ability to ‘run faster, shoot more accurately, jump further, and think smarter than in their everyday life … accounts for the emotional intensity of most games’. While this observation is certainly applicable to many (if not ‘most’) games, I would argue that an appeal that underlies this – and one that is applicable to a broader array of games – is extension of capacity: the granting of the ability to effect some kind of change in the virtual world of a game.  While some games promise the feeling of superhuman ability, it is common for games to trade in the restriction of ability as a core element of their gameplay.

These restrictions can take many forms; although ‘freedom’ is perhaps the most-touted virtue of games in recent years, the player’s ability to ‘act’ through his or her virtual-world avatar is actually intensely proscribed. The button-based interface of most games dictates a limited number of ‘verbs’ available to the player. As Stephen N. Griffin (2005) writes, ‘the button is an artifact of automation. It reduces gesture to symbolic action. Used for jumping, punching, grabbing, rapping and even raping in video play-spaces, the button reduces complex action to a matter of choice’. In-game physics and physical boundaries often provide the framework for and principal challenges of the gameplay. Certain events may only be possible at certain points in the game; The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time (Nintendo, 1998) was one of the earliest popular games to use a context-sensitive controller setup, in which the buttons do different things depending on where the character is in the game’s physical space; this technique remains popular and can be seen in the more recent Bully (Rockstar Games, 2006). Commands can become available to players at certain points in a narrative, as well; the ‘Quick Timer Events’ that introduce a degree of interactivity to the cutscenes of Shenmue (Sega, 1999) are an example. These two forms of context sensitivity are combined in, and provide the primary means of control for, Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream, 2010).

One limit that is common to all games is the spatial boundary of the game world.  Discussing the boundaries of the fictional worlds created by films, Stanley Cavell writes:

The fact that in a moving picture successive film frames are fit flush into the fixed screen frame results in a phenomenological frame that is indefinitely extendible and contractible, limited in the smallness of the object it can grasp only by the state of its technology and in largeness only by the span of the world (Cavell, 1979: 24).

Cavell is here extending to film an argument that he has made about the difference between photographs, which he deems ‘of the world’ – selections from what is phenomenologically perceived as a larger environment beyond the edges of their frames – and paintings, which he deems worlds in themselves: ‘the world of a painting is not continuous with the world of its frame; at its frame, a world finds its limits’ (Cavell 1979: 24).  Video games, I believe, fall somewhere between the two. Like films and photographs, they carry the promise of more space beyond the edge of what is presently observable. Like paintings, they are constructions and they have the limits of physical scope that this implies. If a painting is a world and a photograph or a film is of the world, perhaps it is most appropriate to say that a video game is of a world. Game worlds, by necessity, have ends; in the aesthetic presentation of the worlds, the necessity for boundaries is a design problem that has been addressed in myriad ways.  Techniques for enforcing these boundaries have developed apace with game technology. New representational capacities have called for new ways of depicting, and justifying, restrictions on the game space.

In text-based games, designers can simply not offer the option of moving in a particular direction. At the easternmost edge of a game world, the option ‘go east’ will no longer be available. In these games, spaces are maximally paradigmatic (cf. Altman, 1981: 123). A single ‘screen’ of one of these games is largely left to the imagination; what matters most is what can be done in each area. Single-screen games have boundaries built into their aspect ratios; the edges of the screen are the functional ends of the universes of the games. There are some variations, such as Pac-Man (Midway, 1980) and Asteroids (Zaccaria, 1979), in which the action wraps around the edges of the screen, but in these games, too, there is no significant part of the game world that is offscreen.

The spatial limits of two-dimensional side-scrolling games often also correspond to the edges of the screen. In Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985), the player is free to move forward at his or her own pace (albeit prompted by a time limit for the completion of each level) – the screen scrolls along with Mario or Luigi’s motion – but it is impossible to retrace one’s steps, as the screen will not scroll back. Thus, the farther a player progresses in a level, the less space and the fewer possible actions are available. Progress forward in the levels of Super Mario Bros. actually shrinks the functional world of the game as it is played. As it turns out, the back edge of the screen in Super Mario Bros. can be a useful tool; the ‘chimney technique’, employed by players since soon after the game’s release, is a way of wedging one’s avatar between a vertical row of bricks and the left side of the screen and then jumping repeatedly to scale the resulting ‘chimney’ and reach otherwise unreachable areas. The technique is phenomenologically complex, as it represents an interaction between the (non-diegetic) edge of the screen and bricks that are part of the world of the game; players’ eagerness to discover and use any potential tools at their disposal points to a perception of game worlds and their mechanical or technological contexts as whole units of use. The chimney technique is an example of a kind of endeavor I will examine at more length later: the exploration of the gameplay properties of the physical boundaries of game worlds.

With three-dimensional virtual spaces came new design challenges as regarded the edges of game worlds; as games moved away from their early visual iconicity to forms that increasingly resembled our own reality, new contrivances were developed for the blocking of the player’s paths. Endless rock faces or contiguous buildings might form the ‘walls’ of the game world. In games such as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (Activision, 1999) and True Crime: Streets of LA (Activision, 2003), a player who goes too far in one direction is merely warped back into within an invisible perimeter. The freedom to ‘roam’ around the worlds of these games is often cited as one of their primary appeals, so it is perhaps predictable that encountering their physical boundaries might cause player frustration. If enjoyment of games comes largely from the extension of capacity, as I argue, the physical point at which a player is no longer capable will logically also be a point at which his or her enjoyment is confounded.

In-game freedoms should not, however, be mistaken for radical freedoms. A player’s capacity to act is not expanded into a game world so much as it is extended through a channeling process. A player may quickly adapt to the limitations of action imposed by a game, but it can be difficult to make further adjustments when that set of possible actions is altered, as it is when player motion is suddenly curtailed. Counterplay in the form of virtual-world naturalism does not usually seek to establish radical freedom of motion, nor does it necessarily seek to reestablish, even, the kind of motion that was available to the player before a spatial or behavioral boundary was encountered. Its intent seems to be less libertarian than it is investigative; it seeks to explore, through examination of the contours and the flaws of that boundary, why it is there, how it got there, and what its essential properties are.

In his discussion of the gameplay possibilities of Grand Theft Auto III (Rockstar Games, 2001) and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (Nintendo, 2003), Ian Bogost argues that the spaces of video games are fundamentally tied to player experience of games as enactive systems:

In GTA, the player can choose from a multitude of functions at any given time, each chosen in reference to specific transitional cues the environment provides. When sailing the vast ocean of Wind Waker, the player has few choices, save which direction to sail, and whether to fight or avoid sea monsters when they crop up. Wind Waker’s sea is enormous, and the game offers a wider variety of objects and tools than GTA … but the game offers fewer inspirations for the player to reorient his current activities and make meaningful use of those tools. The size of the world and the quantity of possible actions matter less than the significance of those actions (Bogost, 2006: 159).

Bogost, here, is not arguing that players do not explore the physical spaces of virtual worlds nor that the exploration of those spaces is not meaningful, but that places in games are experienced in terms of the enactive possibilities that they offer. This point can be clarified by Bogost’s analysis of Grand Theft Auto III – gamers say they enjoy the ‘freedom’ afforded by the game design; Bogost argues that this feeling of freedom is less about the actions that are possible in the game (as these are actually quite limited and are almost exclusively criminal in nature) than it is about the fluidity between possible actions that the game allows:

Fire a gun, steal a truck, explore a hidden building, bludgeon a cop, explode a car: although important to the [game’s] appeal, the specificity of these actions is subordinate to the ease of transition between them, and the conscious player decision associated with that gap (Bogost, 2006: 155).

Bogost emphasises the importance of behavioral freedom; I think that freedom of motion (a subset of behavioral freedom) has its own singular pleasures. When Henry Jenkins (2005: 180) writes of the ‘emotional appeal’ of games, he provides ‘moments of … visual spectacle’ such as ‘the big skies that can suddenly open before you as you ride your snow board in SSX’. Great vistas and hidden spaces are enormously appealing in their own right: seeing them – being there – can be reward enough for getting there.

Because freedom of motion is such an important appeal of games, and because the constructed nature of games imposes limits on this freedom, it is to be expected that players would devote some of their energies to finding ways to push the physical limits of game worlds, an endeavor that often results in revelation of some of the processes and decisions underlying these worlds. This pushing, testing approach to the fabric of in-game reality is a form of counterplay that engages the text, simultaneously, on diegetic and extra-diegetic levels. As the material structure of the game world seems to break down, so, too, does the illusory unity of the construction of the space begin to unravel. To flesh out this notion of exploratory counterplay, I will look at three examples of ways in which players have transcended the boundaries of game worlds. The first is drawn from the side-scrolling platform game Super Mario Bros., the second comes from the first-person shooter GoldenEye 007 (Nintendo, 1997), and the third comes from the three-dimensional ‘free-roam’ game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (Rockstar Games, 2004).

Minus World

Super Mario Bros. was enormously popular from the time of its release. With gameplay innovations and imaginative visual style, it, along with the Nintendo Entertainment System with which it was packaged, was largely responsible for ‘saving’ the home console market after the video game crash of 1983. The game offers a world more complex in its physical structure and its emergent dynamics than those typically seen in previous games. With this new complexity came new opportunities for exploration. We have already seen an unexpected gameplay element – the chimney technique – that emerges from the interplay between the static left edge of the frame and brick walls in the game world. Perhaps the best-known of the game’s unanticipated elements is the Minus World, a hidden level in the game that is the result of a combination of glitches in the programming. The Minus World is intriguing in that it is a physical environment within the game, though it was not anticipated by the programmers, and in that once you get there, there is not much that you can do; the level is a continuous loop, which means that the player can only swim though it over and over until time runs out.

Players, though, often make the Minus World their goal destination, even with the knowledge that to arrive there is to sacrifice any chance of conventionally ‘winning’ the game. The Minus World represents an alternative kind of victory. It is a tool for social one-upsmanship, as the object of a privileged form of knowledge; to know about it and to be able to get there gives the player cultural leverage over friends who are not in on the secret. It is also a subversion of the programmers’ intentions for the game. Progression through Super Mario Bros. can take a number of different paths, but overall progress is unilinear. A full game ending in a ‘win’ starts on level 1-1 and ends on level 8-4. Levels along the way may be skipped, but there is no moving backward to earlier levels, and no straying from the slightly forking paths of the game as outlined by its creators.  The Minus World, however, was not part of the game’s creators’ intentions, although it does arise from the code that they produced.

To avoid the possibility of a player getting stuck inside a wall, the game propels Mario (or Luigi) forward when he is overlapping with a brick. This functional fix leads to an interesting development, as it can be used to advance to a warp zone – a set of pipes that, if entered, transport the player to other levels of the game – in world 1-2 of the game. Normally, the player must walk across a long platform and then backtrack in order to get to the pipes; by passing through the wall, the player gets to the pipes without crossing the platform, an action that is necessary for the game to properly load its instructions for what the pipes are supposed to do. Entering the first pipe after passing though the wall takes the player into a warp that is not fully loaded; due to the underlying architecture of the game, the player ends up in a level that is identical to world 7-2 but that is designated as world -1. This level does not have full functionality in that the pipe that is supposed to take Mario out of the underwater part of the level at its end instead deposits him back at the beginning. [1]

The Minus World offers a host of subversions to a player who seeks it out: a violation of the physical laws of the game world, seeming reversal of the sequential flow of levels through a jump ‘back in space’, as it were, and access to a cohesive accidental space that arises from the game code and yields clues about the deeper structures of that world and about the design decisions that gave it its shape. For example, that the destinations of warp pipes are loaded when Mario crosses a particular point on the platform might not have occurred to any player had the process not broken down with the discovery of Mario’s ability to glide through the wall and thus access the pipes without crossing the platform.

For a generation of kids who could finish the regular game with a single life, the Minus World represented a new challenge as well as an intriguing reminder of the constructedness of the game world. There wasn’t much to do once you were there, but getting there – and being there – were their own rewards.

The GoldenEye Citadel

GoldenEye 007 remains a phenomenally popular first-person shooter more than a decade after its release. Level design, gameplay, and multiplayer functionality combine in the game to give it a lasting appeal, even as newer generations of similar games far surpass its technical specifications. With any game of such enduring popularity, extensive player exploration of its world is inevitable. The game was released in 1997, as internet fan culture was spreading and solidifying. The websites and online discussions that sprang up around the game facilitated new kinds of collaboration, allowing players to cooperate in numbers on shaving time off of level speedruns and finding new secrets and strategies. It allowed, too, for new forms of collaboration between virtual-world naturalists.

While the discovery of the Minus World in Super Mario Bros. surely sprang from an emergent situation in gameplay (as the Minus World is not there by design but must have been discovered organically – probably many times over – by players who happened to jump against the right wall in just the right way), the discovery of the partial, and non-playable, Citadel level in GoldenEye was uncovered through player research and exploration of the game’s code. Soon after the release of the game, players began to notice that certain codes used on the GameShark ‘game enhancer’, a device that allows players to tinker with the game’s code, would change the names of characters and locations in the game to ‘Citadel’. A search for a missing ‘Citadel’ level in the game ensued. [2]

The means used for finding the Citadel level are a significant departure from the exploration of the in-game world that might lead a player to try to access the Minus World in Super Mario Bros. Viewed from a ‘virtual-world naturalist’ perspective, this is closer to laboratory science, as it engages first with a constitutive underlying layer of the world, the game code, rather than with the world on its manifest, bodily accessible level, and then builds a model for engagement with the virtual world from the bottom up. The initial clues came from semi-directionless tinkering with the game; unexpected results were observed that led to questions and theories about their origins.

Through exhaustive searching, bits and pieces of the Citadel, scattered around the game’s code, were unearthed. Over time, a partially-functional model of the game space was assembled, navigable but not playable. Mia Consalvo (2007: 131) notes the power to be found in ‘breaking and reconfiguring’ code ‘to the specifications of the player’. This model revealed information about the level-planning inclinations of the game designers and about the development process of the game, in which ideas were discarded half-realised, leaving vestigial passages in the game code and vestigial structures in the game world. These transitional forms are relics of the process of creation; like fossils, they record a moment in the game’s origination, an aid to our understanding of the game in its final form. It is significant that players wanted not only to reconstruct a Citadel map, but to devise a way to inhabit and examine, first-hand, a navigable build of the level. The breaking and reconfiguring of code, though potentially satisfying in its own right, is validated in this case through the higher-level activity it enables: namely, the exploration of a previously-inaccessible game space.

Clues to the Citadel’s existence resulted from manipulation of the program itself, a kind of meta-exploration that uses an approach from outside the game world to open up new exploratory possibilities within the world of the game. Both in-game world exploration and out-of game code investigation would factor in one of the largest-scale searches for hidden game environments to date: the search for the hidden interiors of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Hidden Interiors in the Sky

Among the freedoms afforded players of the Grand Theft Auto games is the freedom to alter the game’s rules. Numerous ‘cheats’ have been built into recent incarnations of the series, some of which give the player gameplay advantages and some of which offer novel challenges or simple aesthetic variation. The inclusions of these cheats allows a player the option, not cast by the game as morally neutral, to change the rules of the game to suit his or her tastes, impulses, or needs. A combination of these cheats, it was discovered, can allow the player to transcend the intended boundaries of the game world in a way that recalls, at once, both the Minus World of Super Mario Bros. and the Citadel level of GoldenEye 007. As with the Citadel level, the discovery of the hidden interiors had its origins in observations of unusual phenomena in the game.

One of the cheats gives the main character, Carl, a jet pack; along with this comes a simple meter that puts a running display of the character’s altitude in the game onto the screen. The altimeter consistently reflects the character’s altitude in the game world when he is atop a building or a mountain or in a plane or helicopter, but players noticed that the meter jumps to very high levels when Carl is inside one of the game’s buildings. Players of the earlier Grand Theft Auto III had discovered, though exploration and use of cheat codes, that some structures were hidden in the game world, so that they could be easily loaded for rendering in cutscenes that took place elsewhere. The altimeter readings in San Andreas seemed to indicate that the models for the interior spaces of the game are hidden in the sky, somewhere well above the flight ceiling of the highest-flying airplane in the game. This geographical separation of the exteriors and interiors of building models allows considerable flexibility in the design of game spaces, as the interiors of buildings would not have to fit precisely, in size or in shape, within the exteriors of the buildings as rendered in the outside world of the game.

Because of the upper limit to airplane flight in the game, it is impossible to get to the hidden interiors by flying up into the sky. However, a combination of a series of discoveries by players, some of them unearthed through gameplay and some through examination of the game’s code, eventually revealed that it is possible to move, high in the sky, between the interior spaces of the game, not by approaching them from outside but by breaking out into them from within. To enter a building in San Andreas is to be teleported, upon crossing its threshold, to a realm high above the world.  A boxing gym in the Ganton neighborhood of the fictional city of Los Santos has a missing ceiling tile. By using a cheat code that gives Carl a jet pack, a player can fly out through this hole in the ceiling and into a dark void. [3]

Landing on the invisible roof of the gym, a player who surveys the area will see that the hidden interiors remain hidden; they are invisible from the outside, even as one approaches them. The only way to locate the interiors, which are spread across the large area of the San Andreas map, is to fly around in the dark, hoping to bump into something or to pick up on some clue: faint voices, the sound of music, a small floating arrow indicating a passable doorway. Despite the fact that Carl is quite literally flying blind around this space in the sky, and despite the fact that if he descends too low, he will be sucked into a free-fall, crashing to the ground and necessitating another trip to the Ganton boxing gym to start over again, players have exhaustively mapped the interiors of the game and devised strategies for moving safely between them. Again, from persistent collective investigation of unexpected phenomena have come increasingly fine-tuned methods for description and navigation of a virtual world.

As might have been expected, exploration of the hidden interiors has revealed a number of spaces not used in the final version of the game. Among these is a tattoo parlor in which Carl can get tattoos unavailable in the ‘real world’ (a mark of distinction for players who have been able to get them); also present are interiors for the homes of some of Carl’s possible girlfriends in the game. The discovery of these hidden spaces motivated a hunt for their utility, which culminated in the discovery of a discarded but partially coded sex minigame that was considered for inclusion in San Andreas. Methods were soon developed for unlocking and playing the sex game informally dubbed ‘Hot Coffee’, and the ensuing media panic cost Rockstar, the game’s developer, untold millions of dollars, a very real negative corporate consequence of players overstepping virtual-world boundaries.

Structures and Processes

While a game may offer more or less ‘freedom’ to its players, the limited number of actions available and the necessary physical limits of the game world inevitably make this a contained freedom, a demarcation of the spaces within which players can explore. By pushing against boundaries, players can not only unveil the hidden structures of game worlds, with their cut corners, pragmatic fixes, and forgotten ideas, but can also gain insight into the real-world processes that give rise to games. The constructedness of the game is made visible; so, too, is its ‘producedness’.

Rockstar, a studio that fosters an image of irreverence, saw fit to back off from including a graphically sexual minigame in San Andreas, for instance. If the hidden interiors of the game had not been discovered by virtual-world naturalists, we would not have the insight that the company considered, but decided against, the depiction of graphic sex in one of its high-profile games. Such an idea, entertained and rejected, is an illustration of the limits and constraints that the company puts on itself. The angry reaction of some media-watchdog groups to the revelation of the content shows Rockstar’s understanding of the limits of public tolerance, an understanding that, when acted upon, is the very opposite of the corporation’s well-constructed public persona. When it comes to graphic sex, Rockstar, that irreverent company, errs on the side of caution.

‘Naturalist’ exploration of virtual worlds can take many forms and can occur at any number of levels of representation within and outside of the imaginary world of the game and can be conducted with or without the use of cheats or external devices. Ultimately, though, virtual-world naturalism comes down to first-person observations made as a player moves through virtual space. Passage to previously unreachable game spaces may be achieved through any combination of diegetic and nondiegetic actions and tools (and certainly through the extradiegetic activities of players and game communities). Navigation of these spaces, however, remains tactile, haptic, textural. A player’s character must actually walk across the floor of a half-completed room to learn if, and to what degree, it is solid. It may take a number of attempts by a large community of players before a passable route across such a floor is discovered. This is closer to natural history – to classical cartography, to stargazing – than it is to Huxley’s ‘superhuman creature’.

The edges of these worlds, with their frustrations and their unexpected utility, come to seem less like the ends of the world than the ends of the known world.  Virtual-world naturalism lays bare the structures and processes that underlie video game environments. Unlike the real universe, the world of a video game can definitively be said to have been created by a designing force and set into motion. As in the real world, the closer we look, the more the microstructures at play make themselves known to us. A seemingly unified virtual world, assembled to appear seamless and to channel players through it in a way that preserves this narrative, temporal, and spatial illusion, can often be coaxed into revealing the interacting rules – physical and metaphysical – that give it shape. Investigations into the systems and boundaries at work in virtual worlds can give us varying forms of insight into their constitution, glimpses of ‘truth’ that compel people on one of the deepest levels imaginable: they reveal the hand of the creator.

Notes

[1] I am relying here on a technical explanation by ‘Barubuary’ that appears to have been carried out over an instant message connection.  A transcript can be found at: http://nintendope.iodized.net/minusworld/minus.php

[2] This account of the search for and discovery of the Citadel level comes from http://goldeneye.detstar.com and http://www.goldeneyeforever.com

[3] The best surviving account of the discovery of this method, and of the process of mapping the hidden interiors, can be found in an 111-page (and counting) discussion at GTAForums: http://www.gtaforums.com/index.php?showtopic=166773

Author’s Biography

Daniel Reynolds is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  His research focuses on the interactions between the emergent properties of video games and the emergent properties of human consciousness.

References

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Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).

Consalvo, Mia. Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).

Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species (New York: Signet Classics, 2003).

Griffin, Stephen N. ‘Push. Play: An Examination of the Gameplay Button’, Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) Conference Proceedings (2005).

Huxley, Aldous. The Perennial Philosophy (London: Fontana Books, 1958).

Jenkins, Henry. ‘Games: The New Lively Art’, Handbook of Computer Game Studies. Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein, eds. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 175-192.

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Wilson, Edward O. ‘Biophilia and the Conservation Ethic’, The Biophilia Hypothesis, Stephen R. Kellert and Edward O. Wilson, eds. (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993), 31-41.

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The star player is one who modifies expected mechanisms of channeling field-potential. The star plays against the rules but not by breaking them (Massumi 2002: 77).

Unruly innovation is an intrinsic dimension of gaming. To claim that play is not a passive or neutral activity is hardly a groundbreaking observation. However, we believe that the contingent and transformative dynamics unleashed by games demand careful analysis. The fact that play exists in excess of any rules or parameters inevitably leads to controversies and disputes, along with processes of economic valorisation and the extraction of value beyond the shifting boundaries of a game. All of this requires critical discussion and debate. In this special issue, therefore, we have invited responses to the concept of counterplay. Referring to ludic or playful vitality in its most transformative expressions, counterplay speaks directly to the disruptive creation of the new through the reiterations of gaming.

Greig de Peuter and Nick Dyer-Witheford first introduced the term counterplay in an article published in The Fibreculture Journal, ‘A Playful Multitude?’ (2005). While part of a much larger and recently completed study of digital games (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009), this early piece of research introduced a framework for considering gaming as exemplary of the imperial form of power theorized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000). They established the relevance of using this approach for considering videogames through a number of important resonances: from the transnational organization of the gaming industry as expressive of ‘immaterial labour’ (Lazzarato 1996) to the themes of World of Warcraft (Blizzard 2004), the Grand Theft Auto series and Full Spectrum Warrior (Pandemic Studios 2004) as modulating the subjectivities congruent with the military, economic and political logic of Empire.

In Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter’s reading, counterplay was informed by the Italian autonomous Marxist premise that labour is always anterior to capital or modes of socio-political discipline and control. Significantly, they redeployed this assertion in terms of playful or ludic action to suggest that technological and capitalistic development in the games industry was primarily driven ‘from below’ by the unanticipated innovations that emerge in gaming cultures. Indeed, the history of digital games would certainly attend to this dynamic, especially considering the role of hobbyists and hackers in the now mythologized origins of games like Spacewar! (Russell et al., 1961), let alone the dynamic, networked and complex relations of incorporation and co-creative labour that define the contemporary architectures of gaming. The most interesting aspect of their model, however, was its reworking of simplistic binaries of resistance and exploitation. As de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford observed, counterplay exists as a potentiality, a preindividual dimension that flows into currents of critical play, tactical media and free and open-source software as readily as intellectual property regimes, governance strategies in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMORPGs) and commercially ‘tethered devices’ (Zittrain 2008).

In this special issue of The Fibreculture Journal, we revisit counterplay by inviting responses to the concept that extend it outside the context of its capture. It is worth tracing some broader links and connections of ‘the counter’ to provide some background to this approach. These contexts move beyond games studies, but also inform how the idea might be understood within the field. We ask: if digital games are consolidated by rules (materially bound by both software and hardware), what disruptive ‘events’ transform the rhythms and patterns of play? How do radical actions emerge that reform the balance of agency in gaming?

Counter-Actualization and Gaming

The notion of ‘the counter’ as a maneuver holds a central place in Deleuzian inspired political thought. In particular, ‘counter-actualization’ was a concept originally conceived by Gilles Deleuze in The Logic of Sense to explore the double-sided problem of structural consistency and contingent variation (1990). This is described through the interrelated dynamics of series and events, referring respectively to the natural patterns that offer a general consistency to life and the resonance of individualized or singular trajectories. While similar concepts would appear throughout his later collaborations with Félix Guattari  – especially in A Thousand Plateaus on the war machine, the apparatus of capture and ritornello (1987: 310-473) – in this text, Deleuze elaborates a unique perspective on the ‘quasi-casual’ relation of events. The issue lies with how problematic structural patterns both persist over time and also retain an openness evidenced by the rise of singular pathways across stratified repetitions.

For Deleuze, events can transform, disrupt or interrupt a series, but only through a specific type of relation that is established by creative doubling. Counter-actualization is, therefore, expressed as a displaced action that allows for transmutations within a pattern of consistency. The creative dimension of an event can only be grasped through a distancing that carries along and perpetuates difference, like an actor or a dancer that performs a novel interpretation of a pre-established role. Identification at a distance can allow a future to be projected from past materials: ‘to the extent that the pure event is each time imprisoned forever in its actualization, counter-actualization liberates it, always for other times’ (1990: 161). In the ontology of Deleuze, there is something game-like in the exploration of these potentials – to counter-actualize involves amplifying a disruptive force across an otherwise reiterative structure ‘to give us the chance to go further than we would have believed possible’ (161).

Referring to this notion of creative doubling, we’re interested in exploring how counter-actualization might be translated into unexpected variations that amend structures of digital game play. Not just the possible configurations of the actions, actors, architecture and objects provided in the game, but also the exploitation of weakness in the games’ artificial intelligence, the cataloging and evaluation of bugs and glitches. One drive is to discover an ur-combination, a configuration, an ‘exploit’ that greatly upsets the balance of the game. This may be as simple as locating an advantage in one particular choice like choosing the Hojo as a starting clan in Shogun: Total War (The Creative Assembly, 2000), or may be as complicated as ‘leeching’ in Ragnarok Online (Gravity Co., 2004).

Counter-actualization, moreover, can highlight the tension between local enactments and the networked elements of digital gameplay. Counterplay, in this sense, leverages the situated by mobilizing hardware, people and the spaces in which play takes place, to produce practices like ‘ghosting’ in Counter-Strike (Valve Software, 2000), or to perform power-ups in Flyff (Aeonsoft, 2005) without having to repeatedly press the same key by jamming the key down with a small five cent coin. Counterplay may also leverage the network itself. In Adrian Mackenzie’s (2002: 166), description of playing Avara (1996, Ambrosia Software) with a friend, he states:

Something struck me as he quickly won a succession of games. He was not only anticipating most of my movements, and my gestures, he was also anticipating and manipulating in certain ways the delays introduced by the network we were playing on.

Lag, created by the uneven speed of data flows across the network, also becomes a site of play. Other forms of lag cheating have been discussed (Consalvo, 2007: 115-116). However, the exploitation that Mackenzie describes does not rely on a built or designed cheat function, but rather on a logistical problem that effects all data transfers based on packet switching from time to time. Significantly, this example demonstrates how unique renditions of everyday informatic systems are generated by the practice of play. Here, digital games become avenues for playing with the human and nonhuman forces that aggregate and are carried through the informational infrastructures of networks.

While counter-actualization appears throughout the work of Deleuze in various expressions, the essay ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ provides an important link in the application of the concept to game studies by considering these digitally-enabled contexts in terms of micropolitics (1992). The piece famously introduces an updated version of Foucault’s reading of disciplinary societies by tracking the rise of a new organisation of the social based on modulating, free-floating and ultra-rapid modes of power. The shift involves moving from isolated institutional locales to the implementation of a highly adaptable ‘mesh’ in the form of socio-technical networks. While this framework is crucial for considering the feedback loops between videogame industries and productive players, the idea of control additionally allows for a consideration of gaming as emblematic of control in an abstract sense: flexible, competitive, accumulative and technical.

Crucially, this emergent regime depends on digital machines: just as discipline used thermodynamic technologies, informational devices and computers are central to the operations of control. While Deleuze (1992: 175) was quick to add that ‘the machines don’t explain anything, you have to analyze the collective arrangements of which the machines are just one component’, this framework has become an important influence on new media studies precisely for supporting an analysis of the agential contributions and entanglements of digital infrastructures with ongoing formations of power. Here, control should be understood as a diagram or a general patterning that appears over and over in different contexts and settings (Deleuze, 1988: 59-77). To put this in Deleuzian terms, the diagram functions as an abstract machine that precedes technical objects by selecting, arranging and organizing them into an assemblage (Bogard 2009). By unpacking this theoretical lineage, like de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford, we’re interested in how digital games are emblematic of informational power, but also how they permit the circulation of unformed potentials from out of these arrangements. In other words, there always exists the potential for counter-information, the capacity to launch eventful individualizations that chart an exterior or outside on the terms of control itself. While there are three sites famously identified in the postscript through which this might take place – viral contamination, noise and piracy – we are interested in how this might occur within spheres of gaming itself (Deleuze, 1992: 175, 180). What can digital games tell us about informational cultures today when we concentrate on their unique qualities and internal mechanisms?

Control societies and counter-actualization, in a significant way, underpin recent influential studies by Alexander Galloway (2004, 2006) on distributed networks and digital games. Both these studies combine Deleuzian insights with the material-technical turn toward software studies in new media research. While software studies is still evolving, this interdisciplinary subfield can be understood as taking programmable media as an object of study, and combining the precepts of computer science with the conceptual dimensions of philosophy, and cultural and social theory (Manovich, 2001; 2008; Fuller, 2008). A strong intervention of Galloway’s work in general emphasizes that software functionality should be framed above all in terms of material agencies, as opposed to readings that stress ephemerality, representation or ‘cyberspace’ (see also Kücklich, 2009). In his analysis of the Internet, focusing on the central role of network protocols like TCP/IP and DNS opens out a series of crucial perspectives on the logic of control as a socio-technical diagram (2004). For instance, these standards regulate information flows, code relations and connect entities; they are ‘etiquette for autonomous agents’ (Galloway, 2004: 242). On the one hand, the argument suggests that the Internet does not work as a chaotic milieu, but as a highly regulated and carefully designed mass media system. From a more abstract perspective, however, the stakes suggest that any representational model of politics is completely inadequate for engagements with control at this scale: the protocological accepts all content equally by striving for the universal incorporation of diversity.

Galloway’s work in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, meanwhile, takes a slightly different tack from a similar premise: digital games are action-based media. As opposed to readings based on the active audience, the analysis is also less concerned with the interpretation of texts than with the gestures of the player and material reconfigurations of the technical system itself – ‘one plays a game. And the software runs. The operator and the machine play the video game together, step by step, move by move’ (2). It is argued that through these dimensions, games offer crucial insights into the functioning of socio-technical power (86). Drawing in part from Fredric Jameson’s film theory in Signatures of the Visible, Galloway advances the argument: ‘video games are allegories for our contemporary life under protocological network of continuous informatic control’ (106). There is no deeper meaning to games in sense of ideology critique, they do not denote any exterior referent, but actually exist as expressions of informatic control itself. In the extreme, McKenzie Wark has even pushed this notion (the ‘allegorithm’) to the centre of critical analysis, arguing that videogames offer tools for thought in tracing the sentiments, subjectivities and political affects that define contemporary worlds: they are control in the purest sense, against which everyday life merely appears as an imperfect and flawed copy (2007).

Despite the drive toward universal acceptance, however, control is not seen as an all-encompassing totality. For Galloway, the pursuit of radical difference is a potential within this regime, but only in terms of channeling the active forces of play. Here, digital games are no longer texts that are re-interpreted by readers, but things that can potentially be re-enacted toward alternate ends. The concept of ‘countergaming’ is, accordingly, introduced by Galloway to examine modifications based on subversive art practices. In the analysis of projects by artists such as Brody Condon, Jodi, Anne-Marie Schleiner, retroYou and Cory Arcangel, countering refers explicitly to avant-gardism. In particular, such works are said to disrupt the formal qualities of games by undercutting physics, interactivity, narrative and representational modeling. Software modifications such as Jodi’s Untitled Game (1996-2001) or Tom Betts QQQ (2002) undo the physics of the game engine by heightening glitches and propagating visual artifacts. These games convey a sense of technical system failure, errors and buggy software, but are also deliberately programmed toward this end: they are modifications that re-direct the gamic experience through extreme self-reflexivity.

While his essay concludes on a critical note, pointing toward how play is consequently effaced from these interventions, counter-actualization is nevertheless used to direct attention to the transformative affects that create structural differences from an existing state of materials. It is here that we want to add a simple corrective – we argue that counter-actualization actually covers a great deal more than Galloway states in his framework. In other words, we believe that artistic modification should be interpreted as just one expression of re-directing codified regimes of play. Interestingly, networked games are not a central concern of Galloway’s formalist study. Neither are the tensions and contradictions between labour and play that drive the global gaming industry, nor the controversies that erupt around networked governance and the problem of cheating. Some precedents exist for this kind of expansive reading of counter-conducts in gaming (Franklin 2009), although we are not concerned with ideas of ‘nonexistence’ or the privileging of technical expertise or knowledge. For our purposes, we simply state that artistic modification should be included alongside many other diverse practices of making things different. Counterplay, therefore, examines and explores the reconfiguration of gaming within already existing, localized, enacted practices of unruly innovation in digital game play.

The Magic Circle, Cheating Controversies and Assemblage Theory

It is clear that counterplay positions play, and digital gameplay in particular, in contact with other objects, people, practices, technologies and things. In this special issue of The Fibreculture Journal, the potential for countering can be read as complicating certain approaches that understand the informational or gamic as a bounded system. For instance, articles by Darshana Jayemanne and Chuk Moran both address a core concern regarding the hermeneutics of digital games that is largely formulated through debates around the importance – or irrelevance – of Johan Huizinga’s (1949/1970) ‘the magic circle’: the notion that play produces a space and time outside of everyday life. Indeed, the various problems associated with strict adherence to the notion of the magic circle have been discussed by recent scholars (see Consalvo 2009, Copier 2009). Vili Lehdonvirta’s (2010) work even goes so far as to suggest that the reliance on the magic circle as a defining concept for game studies object has led to a perpetuation of conceptually dated dichotomies like virtual/real, which have long been revised or rejected in other areas of new media scholarship.

In relation to these debates, Jayemanne’s article ‘The Magic Frame’ identifies two important materialist moments in the development of Huizinga’s theory of play. The first stems from the mass-communications apparatus of time, and the second is dance, in which the freedom of gesture is limited by the materiality of the body. By developing these two moments of counterplay from Homo Ludens to offer a new perspective on contemporary gaming, Jayemanne adds a new perspective on criticism of the magic circle. ‘The Magic Frame’ extends the criticism of the magic circle to discourses of realism in games – that is, the idea that the best of all possible virtual worlds would be as realistic as possible. Jayemanne argues that this assumption cannot account for the success of non-realist games and, accordingly, he returns to the instances of materialist counterplay in Homo Ludens to conceive the apparatus and gesture as frames that produce the spaces of gaming.

In ‘Playing With Game Time: Auto-Saves and Undoing Despite the “Magic Circle”’, Moran offers another strong criticism of the magic circle by looking at the temporal dimension of digital games. Although the particular durations of which the experience of a game is built vary in structure and kind, Moran points to both the fixity of stored data (e.g. saved games) and the complex irregularity of schedules and timings in the everyday to refute the treatment of time in digital games as an autonomous time-apart from everyday life that is experienced as a continuous flow or steady state. Moran draws connections between the game of gaming, everyday life, and the materiality of software through a focused analysis of the significance of the undo command, a command that is more commonly found in work-related software. Undoing, however, is not merely the restoration of a previous state: Moran argues that it constitutes another form of action, as players save and reload, take-back moves, restart missions, and work the system to get the time they need to do what they would like. This is a form of exploitation that generates time while making new demands on the player by animating an iterative form of play. This, Moran argues, is a move from the disciplinary in games where poor performance results in failure, to a form of gaming that materializes modulation and flexible control.

Given these constitutive aspects through which aspects of counterplay are an always-present potential of any game, it is evident that there is more at stake than just unfair behaviour, foul play or cheating. Indeed, in Huizinga’s understanding, ‘the cheat’ is not positioned as a disruption to play, because the cheat is invested in the notion of the game, or at least in the appearance of playing it (1949/1970: 30). Mia Consalvo’s (2007) treatment of cheating, which examines the notion in relation to both in-game social practices and technologically enhanced forms of play, argues convincingly that in digital games what is defined as cheating is situated, determined largely by context and consensus. Accordingly, Huizinga is more concerned with the ‘spoil-sport’, the player who rather than bending or breaking the rules refuses to accept them: ‘by withdrawing from the game, he [the spoil-sport] reveals the relativity and frugality of the play-world’ (1949/1970: 30). Contemporary digital game spoil-sports include in their ranks the real-money-traders and gold farmers of massive multiplayer online games, and artists like Joseph DeLappe, whose project dead-in-iraq (2006) involved him logging into the team-based first-person shooter America’s Army (U.S. Army, 2002) and typing out the names of the (American) war casualties.

When understood as emergent and contingent socio-technical controversies, cheating in videogames requires unique modes of analysis capable of charting distributed agencies between coded objects, hardware affordances, player actions, and other desires, contestations and complaints. In her article for this collection, ‘Rule-Making and Rule-Breaking: Game Development and the Governance of Emergent Behaviour’, Jennifer Whitson examines this nexus from the perspective of how game companies harness the rationalities of play to maintain control of digital play in networked settings. Her approach combines key insights from Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) with Foucault’s influential work on governmentality in order to gauge the flows of agency and immanent management of game worlds. Here, the concept of the ontogenetic network from Bruno Latour (2005) is especially useful for describing the diversity of human (programmers, designers, players and producers) and nonhuman actants (software and hardware technologies) that can be traced as integral elements of gaming. In this arrangement, taking insights from geneaologies of biopolitics, developers take on the role of ‘shepherds’ by guiding agential processes while circumscribing the emergence of dissidence, like the counter-conduct of real world economies. Whitson’s piece effectively demonstrates the utility of these new frameworks for exploring the entangled dynamism that drives evolving formations of digital play.

Taking a similar set of theoretical resources as a starting point, Stefano De Paoli and Aphra Kerr meanwhile offer a detailed consideration of relational ontology as a methodological approach in their piece, ‘The Assemblage of Cheating: How to Study Cheating as Imbroglio in MMORPGs’. Here, in order to follow the shifting and contested boundary of cheating, different elaborations of the concept of assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; DeLanda 2006; Latour 2004) are used to map competing elements of MMORPGs as ongoing materially expressive formation. This means taking up how game architectures, software code (especially anti-cheating tools), licenses and legal documents, and hetereogeneous play styles converge toward controversial outcomes: the cheating assemblage. Processes of territorialisation and deterritorialisation are central in their approach to tracking both material and expressive conditions of possibility for play, or what is considered to be legal and illegal actions within a game. Illustrated through empirical data from a study of the online world of Tibia (CipSoft 1997), De Paoli and Kerr reveal how assemblage provides a conceptual map of the game as a space of confrontation and power contestations. As an important caveat, they warn against readings of counterplay that presume player resistance and empowerment, advocating instead a tempered conceptual and empirical framework that can illuminate the ongoing struggle for power in control settings.

Interestingly, the idea that digital games are hermeneutic objects produced through the dynamic interplay of a person and a machine is demonstrably critiqued in several ways by all these scholars writing on counterplay for this special issue of The Fibreculture Journal. However, this is not the only critique that counterplay offers. The following section presents articles that develop and nuance de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford’s long term concern with the relations of labour in the production and commodification of digital games (see de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford 2005; Dyer-Witheford 1999; Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009; Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and de Peuter 2003)

Co-Creative Labour and Ludic Exodus

Counterplay can be used to describe innovative forms of digital gameplay that involve the invention and transmission of new rule-sets. James Newman (2008) describes this as ‘superplay’ and includes several forms of player innovation in its rubric: speedruns, sequence-breaking and Machinima. These activities extend the life-cycle of digital games because they allow for – and often demand – replaying of completed games. Thus, superplay is ripe for capture. The capture of superplay, for instance, in contemporary gaming is illustrated by the proliferation of ‘awards’ and ‘trophies’ on seventh generation consoles that require players to complete repetitive and/or obscure tasks.

A number of articles in this special issue of The Fibreculture Journal present singular, but complimentary, understandings of superplay as a form of counterplay: Daniel Ashton and James Newman present an analysis of the disciplinary dimension of counterplay; Daniel Reynold’s article examines the role of the discovery of counterplay moments in the experience of play; while Olli Sotamaa’s work focuses on a case study that problematizes the successful capture of counterplay in the game LittleBigPlanet (Media Molecule, 2008).

In ‘Relations of Control: Walkthroughs and the Structuring of Player Agency’, Ashton and Newman argue that while digital game walkthroughs provide instruction on various elements of gameplay, they also have a disciplinary role that structures gameplay. The article examines the playful, exploratory arena of the use and production of digital game walkthroughs, identifying a number of common practices: the management of player identity, the demonstration of gaming prowess and expertise, and the interrogation of the potentialities of digital games that exist alongside governing and structuring player agency. Ashton and Newman focus on the forms of governance and control that mark these social contexts and player relations in walkthroughs.

Reynolds’ article, ‘Virtual-World Naturalism’ contrasts the exploratory actions of digital game play with the apparent rigidity and seamlessness of their virtual spaces, both in terms of their geographic constraints and the rules that constitute their interactive possibilities. Reynolds  argues that part of play is to test the spatial and behavioral nuances of digital games, in order to uncover the hidden structures that underpin the game “as it was intended to be played”. In a discussion of the ‘Minus World’ in Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985), the Citadel level in Goldeneye 007 (Rareware, 1997), and the ‘hidden interiors’ of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (Rockstar North, 2004), ‘Virtual-World Naturalism’ argues that such exploration, as part of a complex dialogue between game players and creators, can be seen as a form of natural history, a systematic search for patterns carried out in pursuit of of the origins of the virtual world.

Sotamaa’s contribution to this journal issue tracks how various player agencies have become incorporated into the PlayStation3 game LittleBigPlanet (Media Molecule, 2008). ‘Play, Create, Share? Console Gaming, Player Production and Gaming’ offers a reading in terms of theories of co-creative labour and Jonathan Zittrain’s (2008) argument on tethered devices, through which Sotamaa illustrates the economic and technical structures of the game. While including this possibility for players to become involved in the development and design of levels, Sotamaa additionally argues that these new options do not automatically make all players active or empowered participants.

In terms of the relation between dissident ludic dynamics and capture, counterplay has some resonance with the research on player-led innovation from the perspective of creative industries. While emerging from a different context, this approach provides a remarkably similar description of the centrality of unruly innovation to the continuing profitability of the digital games industry. Axel Bruns (2008), for example, maps out a number of possible relations between end users and owners of media products, one of which, ‘harnessing the hive’ – which he adapts from J. C. Herz (2005) – focuses on how user-led practices can be effectively reincorporated into existing products. There are numerous cases of the digital games industry ‘harnessing the hive’: the commercial release of Counter-Strike, the foregrounding of the role that the virtual economy would play in Second Life (Linden Labs, 2003), following the ‘discovery’ of virtual economies in other MMORPGs; and the release of The Movies (Lionheart Studios, 2005) in the wake of the widespread recognition of machinima.

Distinguishing between the capture of counterplay and harnessing the hive serves to demonstrate another key feature of counterplay. While the notion of harnessing the hive strongly suggests that the zeitgeist of contemporary digital gaming relies on a synergy between industry and audience, the capture of counterplay underscores how the digital games industry profits from the creativity and innovative practices of players, both by recognizing them as a potential source of profit, and subsequently re-structuring individual games as well as elements of the gaming industry to recuperate creative practices as features, products or services. Counterplay – and its capture – provide an account of play that emphasizes the oscillation between creativity and control in players enactments of digital play. As a concept, it underscores the ambiguous relationship between training and practice found in digital games. Counterplay can, accordingly, trace the stakes for the potential for gaming in both dissident and disciplinary dimensions.

In an analysis of the more radically innovative aspects of digital play cultures, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter provide the final contribution to this special issue with their article ‘Games of the Multitude’. Here, contemporary gaming formations are charted in terms of their routine capacity to produce trajectories that disturb and exceed their own commodification. On a theoretical level, their contribution takes up the controversial suggestion by Hardt and Negri that the network form or morphology that underpins control societies is led by the potential for labour to become common (2000). While Hardt and Negri maintain that the current forms of biopower are expressive of a new sovereignty that reigns over the global present (Empire), they assert the presence of a counter-tendency for the multitude to construct real alternatives, to invent new democratic forms and a constituent power on imperial terrain itself.

In these terms, de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford explore various politically experimental practices with gaming, including playing against the grain of ideologically-loaded games; instances of dissonant development from a number of mainstream game studios; the production of tactical games by counter-globalization and anti-war activists; the ambivalent social planning potential of ‘serious games’ as polity simulators; experiments at self-organization in online virtual worlds; and the emergence of software commons as a challenge to intellectual property regimes. These expressions of counterplay are posited by Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter as remaking gaming practices in ways that connect to a variety of struggles against imperial biopower. This is seen occurring in a constant ebb and flux of deterritorialization and reterritorialization through which new lines of flight are produced. ‘Games of the Multitude’ offers a challenging contribution to an understanding of counter-actualization as the active trajectories of ludic exodus.

As we have noted throughout this editorial, it’s easy to project celebratory and heroic narratives of resistance through the conceptual lens of counterplay. Moreover, as these contributions to this collection clearly demonstrate, not all acts of counterplay can be meaningfully understood as political interventions or entirely empowering for players. In a reflection on the role of creativity under conditions of control, Deleuze once observed how “counter-information only really becomes effective when it is – and it is by nature – or becomes an act of resistance” (2006: 322). While it is perhaps this dimension that Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter pursue in force, it is nevertheless worth emphasizing how these politically radical dynamics are drawn from a similar starting point. In other words, it is precisely the ambivalence of counterplay that makes it an interesting stance to the complexities of digital and networked games. As we stated in our call for papers, counterplay emerges from the dynamics unleashed between the intertwined qualities of the virtual and the actual, which work to mobilize a series of subjects, objects and things toward a variety of ends. This is a relational and comparative framework that allows for productive readings between topics as diverse as virtual exploration, cheating controversies, co-creative labour, gaming governance, temporality and activist videogames. It is this productive ambiguity of the concept to treat the unexpected entanglements and radical innovations of games cultures that we hope is demonstrated by the contributions to this special issue.

Acknowledgements

John Banks, Matteo Bittanti, Ian Bogost, Gordon Calleja, Nathan Dutton, Tanner Higgin, Sal Humphreys, Darshana Jayemanne, Jesper Juul, Rachael Kendrick, Kyle Kontour, Julian Kücklich, Markus Montola, Andrew Murphie, Celia Pearce, Martin Pichlmair, Eugenie Shinkle, Laurie N. Taylor, T. L. Taylor, Nathaniel Tkacz, Mat Wall-Smith, and Christopher S. Walsh.

Editors’ Biographies

Thomas ‘Tom’ Apperley is an consultant, ethnographer, and researcher on digital media cultures and technologies. He has previously  written on digital games, mobile technologies, digital literacies and pedagogies, and the digital divide. He has taught at the University of Melbourne, Victoria University, and (currently) the University of New England. He is the co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal, Digital Culture & Education.

Michael Dieter is a researcher on media art and materialist philosophy. His writing concerns critical uses of digital and networked technologies, and covers topics such as locative media, information visualization, gaming and software modification. He is an ongoing contributor to the magazine Neural, an assistant editor for the Institute of Network Cultures and a member of the editorial committee of the Fibreculture Journal. He has taught at University of Melbourne and is currently based at University of Amsterdam.

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