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FCJ-114 Towards an Archaeology of Media Ecologies: ‘Media Ecology’, Political Subjectivation and Free Radios
Michael Goddard University Of Salford. [Abstract] Introduction While Matthew Fuller’s book entitled Media Ecologies has had a considerable impact on research into new media, digital art, alternative media and other spheres, it still remains relatively little-known in mainstream media studies and contains great potential for further development in relation to many fields of media research. Media Ecology is a term that has existed for some time at the peripheries of media studies and theories, and is notably associated with the celebrated media theorist Marshall McLuhan. There is, however, a certain perhaps necessary confusion around the deployment of the term ‘Media Ecologies’ in Fuller’s book, partly because of the differences in this deployment from the already existing field of research known as ‘Media Ecology’, a US-based post-McLuhan stream of media research of which the most well-known figure is undoubtedly Neil Postman. The following essay will therefore touch upon these differences, before…
FCJ-110 Relations of Control: Walkthroughs and the Structuring of Player Agency
Daniel Ashton and James Newman, Bath Spa University 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…
FCJ-111 Playing with Game Time: Auto-Saves and Undoing Despite the ‘Magic Circle’
Chuk Moran, University of California, San Diego 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…
FCJ-106 Rule Making and Rule Breaking: Game Development and the Governance of Emergent Behaviour
Jennifer R. Whitson, Carleton University 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,…
FCJ-107 The Assemblage of Cheating: How to Study Cheating as Imbroglio in MMORPGs
Stefano De Paoli, National University of Ireland Maynooth 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…
FCJ-113 Games of Multitude
Nick Dyer-Witheford, University of Western Ontario 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…
FCJ-109 Play, Create, Share? Console Gaming, Player Production and Agency
Olli Sotamaa, University of Tampere 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,…
FCJ-112 Magic Frames: The Best of All Possible Virtual Worlds
Darshana Jayemanne, University of Melbourne 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…
FCJ-108 Virtual-World Naturalism
Daniel Reynolds, University of California, Santa Barbara 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…
FCJ-105 Materiality of a Simulation: Scratch “Reading” Machine, 1931
Craig Saper Professor of Texts and Technology, University of Central Florida ‘Take any text speed it up slow it down run it backwards inch it and you will hear words that were not in the original recording new words made by the machine different people will scan out different words of course but some of the words are quite clearly there and anyone can hear them words which were not in the original tape but which are in many cases relevant to the original text as if the words themselves had been interrogated and forced to reveal their hidden meanings.’ William S. Burroughs, The Invisible Generation People got their opinions Where do they come from? Each day seems like a natural fact And what we think changes how we act. Gang of Four, ‘Why Theory’ In the epigram above, the post-punk band, Gang of Four, explains why we need theory…
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