Inbetween Games

So, I’ve become a little fried on City of Heroes. I was pushing with vigor to get my fire blaster, Gates, up to level 14; at 14 you can pick up the flight power and that’s when the real fun begins, right? Actually, at 14 you realize the flight power is fun for a bit and certainly convenient, but doesn’t exactly shift your paradigms.

The CoH expansion, City of Villains, can’t come fast enough. The current game is full of people starving for new ways to make meaning of the space. The new dance emote stuff in CoH is a strange, peripheral new batch of functionality: it’s more elaborate than the other emote animations, but not qualitatively different. It’s also just odd for the game: what superhero dances? (Okay, Dazzler. But no superhero does these dances, which can be described in terms like “hoedown” and “white boy overbite.”) Yet, dancing is confoundingly popular. Because it’s something different to do. I sound like a broken record, but the extraordinary avatar creation interface in the game creates an expectation that the ongoing gameplay will have related outlets for creativity. It doesn’t, not yet. And so players turn to fan fiction and dance emotes.

Speaking of dancing, this is some good MMOG dancing. The entertainer profession in Star Wars Galaxies is really quite a thing, maybe one of the most innovative components of the game. And this artifact from it speaks to the impulse in fans to turn a game, a text, or what I describe in the diss as a fiction network, into something that is theirs. This is what Henry Jenkins talks about in his Textual Poachers, and what Michel de Certeau talks about in his The Practice of Everyday Life.

Things are different now from when these books were first published, of course, because we have the technology to a.) enter a stylized simulation and enact a text within a fiction ourselves; b.) capture that enactment, set it to music, and edit it with sophisticated video production software; c.) publicize that video on boingboing and dozens of other blogs and sites, and distribute it to thousands of viewers. The digital artifacts of our use have much more social and transformative potential than the “invisible poachings” of de Certeau ever could. And we now have simulations like MMOGs where meaning is made almost entirely through the act of use, where the distance between product and poaching is dissolved.

But the impulse to make Cantina Crawl VII is, I believe, not that different from the impulse toward fan fiction, or the childhood impulse toward creating elaborate narratives with toys. Or, the impulse to really inhabit CoH, instead of just killing baddies in it. These are all impulses toward meaningful use, an impulse which drives a lot of people toward MMOGs as spaces. SWG is getting some grief this week because of a development delay, but I’m drifting back to it these days because it’s done a cool thing by actually supporting this impulse.