Petsmart 2: Pet Smarter

So I decided to train in bio-engineer. It’s a good match with creature handler, allows me to mix crafting and exploring, and is fairly rare in the game. Or so I thought… another guild member, also training in bio-engineer, is worried that we will run each other out of business. Which seems odd, considering we have dozens of creature handlers and therefore, presumably, a pretty good consumer base. We’ll see.

To train in bio-engineer, one must:

1.) master hunting (got that, had to do it for creature handler)
2.) train as a medic and master organic chemistry (medical crafting)
3.) have 10,000 medical crafting points besides.

Step two involves the production of medical goods through the combination of organic and inorganic materials within a crafting interface. Many, many times over. About halfway through step two — I had gotten organic chem 1 and 2 but still needed 3 and 4 — people started asking me obvious questions like, why have you been sitting around for days? Why are you actually producing artifacts for every crafting action you undertake, rather than running practice mode? And, finally, why aren’t you macroing this?

The practice of exploits or cheats in gaming — and in gaming research — is one that has generated a lot of talk amongst game researchers. Perhaps the zenith moment of this was the recent quoting of Mia Consalvo by the New York Times: “Researchers shouldn’t cheat.”

Here’s my philosophy, laid out on the table: I think discussing “cheating” as if the signification is absolute and unproblematic demonstrates vast blind spots toward both the practices of gaming and the practices of video game studies. Luckily, this seems to indict only the New York Times: Consalvo’s thoughts, as articulated in her blog (including this good entry) are much more nuanced and balanced.

My goals in research follow from some conclusions I’ve drawn about persistent worlds. First: that they are multi-generic spaces, and only some of the genres of engagement involved can be considered “games.” A good appraisal of a persistent world game requires an understanding of as broad a range of those genres as possible. Second: the researcher’s first goal is to integrate with the society as best as possible, to “go native” and understand the affinity group of players as a player. One has to have a degree of critical distance in order to analyze, of course, but one also has to have a contextual or “insider” understanding of what is going on. This conclusion stems from Aarseth’s statements on game research, and from Gee, and from my own knowledge that I couldn’t be a good researcher of comics or games if I hadn’t also been a fan for years.

Star Wars Galaxies as a game reflects, in its interface, some of Raph’s Laws of Design:

Macroing, botting, and automation
No matter what you do, someone is going to automate the process of playing your world.

Corollary:
Looking at what parts of your game players tend to automate is a good way to determine which parts of the game are tedious and/or not fun.

Macroing is enabled in the Star Wars Galaxies interface, right there under “Abilities and Commands.” Macros are discussed openly on the official SWG forums. Macroing, in itself, is a part of the game. I can’t imagine any argument that classifies an armor-changing macro, or a dance macro that enables an entertainer to chat and socialize (the goal of the profession) rather than continually typing “/flourish 3″, as cheating. The issue seems not to be: should you macro? but rather: are your macros used for good or ill?

I have an armor macro, and I had a dance macro, and I have used both without hesitation. But I’ve steered clear of “grinding macros,” which expedite the repetition of actions that grant a user experience (like crafting). Every head shot, every unarmed stun move, every camp, every batch of harvested hide was all me. It takes me, in some cases, a bit longer to level up, but that doesn’t bother me, and it seemed purer.

Medical crafting, though… I could have spent that time creature training, or learning about setting up a vendor, or doing the bio-engineer functions I actually wanted to do, or, God forbid, talking to people. And my guild compatriots were thinking me more than slightly mental.

So I did it: I set up the macro another guild member sent me, ran two crafting stations at once, and got through the rest of my organic chem in about an hour’s time. The macro isn’t fully automated, just expedited, so I didn’t participate in the whole afk-macro-hologrind performance that’s so socially annoying. I just went to a quiet corner and got through it.

I’m a novice bio-engineer now. I learned a little bit — I understand looping in SWG scripting (not that it’s rocket science) — and I’m closer to participating in my player-city economy in a meaningful way. I got to experience this conflict between player philosophies and researcher philosophies, and realize that, even if I’d gone the no-macro route, that decidedly non-conformist position would have had its own negative implications. Should we, as researchers, always play the game as the designers intended, or should we play the game as the society actually plays it?

A third conclusion I’ve drawn in my research is this: what I call fiction networks are sites of ongoing negotiation between information/spectacles/simulations generated by corporate bodies, and the responses and recombinations a readership/audience/player base generates from that product. A grinding macro in this context is a response, a recombination that expresses a dissent with how the game has been presented. I doubt I’ll ever use another — I tend to enjoy the game play, and this is the first time I’ve ever wanted to just get through a series of actions rather than experience them — but I think it’s important to think about this not in terms of “macros bad” but rather “macros mean something.”

And, while I found this experience valuable, I also feel a little guilty about it, as the tone of this message may reflect. There’s a vast continuum of actions that could, under the most totalizing eye, be classified as “cheating,” and in the past I’ve had no hesitation in taking on some of the actions in this continuum, because, honestly, they weren’t cheating, even in an unreflective sense. This is more a borderline case… but I’ve learned more and thought more about this game because of it, and have to say that this has been really productive for my research.