earthx.org blog

Some job news: I’ve had the good fortune to be able to sign on with Enspire Learning. Enspire develops simulations for learning and training, and I’ve already been blown away by some of their work. I start on Monday.

It’s all happened very quickly: I just defended a little over a month ago. This week’s been a mad dash of cleaning out the office and doing all the logistical work I expected to have a couple of months to do.

I’m very happy. For a while I danced around the idea of the academic market, mostly because I want to keep doing scholarship, but that’s what weekends are for. Mike and I are happy and settled in Austin, and there’s no sense in messing with that when there’s plenty of opportunity for both of us here. That’s all I’ll say about that, but I will point out

• Sellout;
• The Chronicle on Nonacademic Careers;
• And a list of links Beyond the Ivory Tower.

So this is the real ending of school, as opposed to the cursory half-endings I’ve played around with in the past, enrolling for three hours a semester and paying my tuition for the privilege of being partially committed to both software development and scholarship. Last year I decided to stop messing around, and not to leave the English building until the big paper was finished. Somehow that worked, mostly because of the generosity of some kind people who liked my rambling about video games.

With the ending of school comes the eventual end of my web hosting privileges at UT. Do I have five months, a year? I don’t know, but I’m nervous. I’ve been hosted here for seven years now, and I dread what this will do to my Google PageRank. Oh well, those are the breaks. Flex Mentallo’s never coming out as a graphic novel anyway.

I think this blog will change (go dormant, or undergo a massive rethinking) in the next couple of months. It’s very task-specific, and it always feels weird to write about anything here that doesn’t have to do with the dissertation. When I make a decision, I’ll let you know.

But I eventually realized that I wanted to live in “Sky Captain,” not watch it.

– Stephanie Zacharek’s review of the movie

Tim O’Neil’s PopCultureShock remix of Astonishing X-Men #4 made me laugh until I had a coughing fit. But his Superman remix is probably more fit for general consumption.

More from the Austin Game Conference, September 9:

“The Right Content Mix”: Starr Long (NCSoft), Jason Durall (WolfPack), John Hanna (SOE), Jack Emmert (Cryptic), Rich Vogel (SOE)

Vogel opened by outlining five types of content: static, dynamic, player-generated, systemic, emergent. The “static/dynamic” distinction wasn’t between textual and procedural content, as far as I could tell — rather, a dynamic content component is a static content component that changes at runtime based on a random variable or user-specific data. Systemic content as he described it encompassed high-level rule structures (advancement algorithms, combat rules).

Average hours of gameplay content at launch was a recurring concern. The panel went back and forth a bit on the ideal number of hours of missions scripted at launch.

Emmert posited that certain techniques of content production and conception were “ossified” and entreated the audience to consider new paradigms. He cited the avatar creation system in CoH as an avenue to replayability — after you get bored with CoH as one character, you can advance through it again as another. New mechanics were cited as a next step in content production, but it was also noted that WoW has gone another direction, loading the system with an unprecedented amount of mission content.

Dynamic content was discussed as a way of achieving one of my favorite content concepts, “repetition with variation.” Less encouraging was the almost-singular focus on randomizers as ways of generating dynamic content.

Emmert echoed the morning’s keynote and discussed the possibilities of widespread online gaming, with Madden MMP as a speculative new model.

Some passing mentions of emergent gameplay and AI, then a discussion of user-generated content. Hanna (I think) largely dismissed user-generated content, saying most of it is substandard. Long then quite logically suggested distributed peer evaluation systems as a means of organizing content by quality.

Mission lengths should be variable, the panel agreed. Emmert emphasized the importance of players’ knowing the time impact of the choices they make in-game.

Vogel insisted a game must have grind. Later, when asked why, he said that achievement is a key pleasure in play.

It was interesting to note that guilds didn’t come up until late in the panel, and then pretty much just in passing. Vogel said more than once that “people do not entertain other people very well.”

“Building IP That Lasts”: Richard Garriott (NCSoft)

“Designing Within a License”: Rich Vogel (SOE), Mark Jacobs (Mythic), Vijay Lakshman (Turbine), Chris McKibbin (Perpetual)

Garriott made several strong points about the importance of original IP here, points that were somewhat underscored by the cautionary tales of the following panel (on licenses.) He noted that, as much of the market is derivative, one needs to create new IP at the early stages of a market segment’s development, or open that segment with new IP.

Garriott then traced the evolution of Ultima as an intellectual property over its many versions. It was fun to think about, and to hear Garriott discuss, Ultima’s evolution as a property, from a more familiar fantasy RPG in its first iterations to a unique world with unique concerns from Ultima IV on. Ultima began with a traditional genre, established a property within it, then recombined it with new concerns and elements to generate something new.

Another thread involved the recurrence of mathematical motifs — three principles, eight virtues, Phi as a recurring theme in Tabula Rasa. A cool organizing structure for game design: human concepts understood as quantifiable principles.

After Ultima, Tabula Rasa: a new IP focused on innovation, deliberately alien to what the market has previously produced. Some of the innovations have worked: the ideographic language created for the game, and the recurrence of Phi as a design principle. Garriott highlighted some of the avatar designs as less effective, and used the talk as an opportunity to present new designs: more familiar space warrior avatars have replaced the previous avatars, which Garriott described as “kung fu monks from space” (I always thought they had more Moebius going on).

Like Ultima, Tabula Rasa has some points of negotiation between change and the familiar, but it was very exciting to see that impulse to innovate at play, and to get a glimpse of Garriott’s vision of games and virtual worlds as media for original, expressive design.

The following panel, “Designing Within a License,” varied considerably from Garriott’s presentation, less a counterpoint than a different animal altogether. The discussion tended more toward production than design, with the major focus being the maintenance of a productive relationship with one’s licensor. Mark Jacobs, the loyal opposition with a public domain property (Camelot), bemoaned the difficulties of managing a license, and the other panelists conceded many challenges, although both Vogel and Lakshman raised points about the market power of a recognizable property, and the focus achieved by having a license as a design constraint.

This panel was responsible for the strangest moment of the day: Lakshman’s claim that loyal players have for years waited for the opportunity to play Dungeons and Dragons online. Huh?

I just started playing Puzzle Pirates today.

I love Puzzle Pirates.

Just responded to Tim Burke’s good analysis of ludology, narratology and cultural studies at Terra Nova, and am also posting here for posterity.

Tim, this is a great piece, and not only because you’ve given props to historical readings of Captain America . I’m going to do a hit and run on a number of points, and am looking forward to expanding on them through discussion here.

It feels strange and kind of thrilling to think about ludology as affinate to cultural studies, after being convinced for a while now that my decision to work within cultural studies puts me outside ludology in a big way. Unfortunately, I don’t know if these connections between the two are always acknowledged in the preexisting debate. I think that the origin of the ludological position — Aarseth’s Cybertext — interprets the extratextual as something very different from what we as cultural scholars understand as production and consumption, culture, or use. His distinction is not between texts and reception but between texts and textual machines, and the ludological focus of study is the textual machine. The player is necessary to actuate a semiotic sequence, but her or his historical or sociocultural position doesn’t really seem to enter into the equation.

In First Person, both Jenkins and Moulthrop note this elision of cultural considerations in much ludological literature, and the ludologists’ responses to them don’t disagree. I think Juul’s response to Kuklich, which you cite, signals a gradual reconciliation between games as ludic systems and games as artifacts within larger systems of media production and consumption, which makes me very happy. But I would argue that is a fairly recent development. Again, I like very much your assertion of the importance of a historical, even Bakhtinian perspective on game genres, but I think this perspective is a departure from most canonical ludological writing, even more so than the narratological view as you’ve presented it:

In the context of games criticism, this tendency might lead to a narratologist placing enormous interpretative weight on the fact that most first-person shooters are structured by conflicts between the player’s avatar and small groups of three to six enemies, seeing this as a narrative choice that has authorial intent behind it.

Is this a narratological position? It seems to map pretty directly to the ludological method Frasca calls “simulation rhetoric” in The Video Game Theory Reader. Sometimes I worry that “narratologist” becomes a straw man, a signifier more for “dilletante humanist who knows shit about video games” rather than “practitioner of narratological methods of inquiry.” Certainly this isn’t always the case, but the tendency toward agonism and ad hominem attack in the responses of Eskelinen and others makes me worry that what begins as a distinction between different opinions can easily slip into counter-productive othering. At this point, I have no idea whether I’m a ludologist or narratologist, and I suspect I’m not alone.

Then there’s the institutional question. I agree 100% that there are plenty of opportunities in new fields of inquiry (including game studies) to upend traditional academic publishing and use the blogosphere and other contexts that are much less ossified. But there’s still that darn institution, and envisioning game studies as non-institutional seems to ensure that those who study games academically must do so through the backdoor, after getting a tenured position in something else, as many of the scholars here have done. You have the professional luxury to decry the journals and celebrate the blogosphere, but I’m a kid scholar looking at a US academic market where formal publication is still a prerequisite to success, and the most popular games studies programs are looking for a shipped title, not a Ph.D., under one’s belt. These contextual realities bear on my perspective quite a bit. I have lots of material in my diss that speaks to the points you raise here, and I’d much rather blog about it than go through arduous journal submission, but every time I put something out on the Web, I’m consumed with anxiety about what it does to my chances of getting a book contract. This is a young field, practiced by young scholars, and I’d love to see some more discussion about ways to reconcile old (journal) and new (blog) modes of publication and distribution.

Finally, I’d like to open up the question: how well does ludology address the question of virtual worlds? Juul and Rules of Play have both noted that MMOGs deviate pretty considerably from the classic (Caillois-ian) definition of games. Virtual worlds impact the ludology/narratology debate in a big way, and this is the ideal place to begin teasing out exactly how.

Thanks,
Jason

I now have a proper homepage, with a CV and some papers and all that stuff.

More notes from AGC soon, I promise. I have to do some coding first.

The 9AM Thursday keynote address was “Massively Multiplayer Console is Coming” and was a two-fer — Microsoft’s Scott Henson first, followed by Glen Van Datta of Sony. It was lovely to see the yin and yang here: Henson’s peppy sales pitch was counterbalanced by Van Datta’s market analysis, which had a bleakness to it vis-a-vis the potentials of the existing persistent world model to successfully translate to the console.

Henson’s big points: XBox got networking right from the get-go; XBox Live is doing great; XBox Live provides all these wonderful low-level services (login, communications and messaging functions, billing and support) so you as the online game developer don’t have to.

Which isn’t unprecedented. The Station, PlayNC, Microsoft’s Passport all centralize some of these services for PC gaming, and it works. What was weird, though, was the Live services as Henson described them: they seemed to be expanding beyond that level into the level of community and online identity. The XBox Live model seems to make you an XBox Live player first and a player of your particular game second: a repeated point was that messaging is global to the service, and that your Live handle is a crucial signifier of who you are in the entire game system.

This works quite well for casual online gaming, but how would it affect social cohesion in a persistent world? Does this impact your role-playing identity at all, or can you be “Alice Ravenwind” to your game and “p33h3ad99″ to the Live community? I haven’t experienced XBox Live, so I’m going to assume the latter here, though there wasn’t enough information to be sure. Overall, Henson talked mostly about current online games and didn’t focus much on persistent state worlds of any sort.

Next came Glen Van Datta, who entered to the opening bars of “Eye of the Tiger,” wearing boxing gloves. Because Microsoft and Sony fight with each other, get it? That one didn’t really go over well. IMO Glen missed a golden opportunity to use the “Eye of the Tiger” performance from the Starbucks commercial, where Survivor sings over the opening bars “GLENN! Glenn Glenn GLENN!” That would have at least gotten a chuckle out of me. Glen’s speech was kind of cursed: just as he was beginning to recover from the boxing joke, the PA malfunctioned and random conversations began to superimpose themselves over his speech. You had to feel for the guy.

Glen talked about the harsh realities of the PS2’s hardware and said a PS player occupies a wide age range, is on average cost-conscious, does not on average have a PC, and on average does not have a broadband connection. The PS2 hardware and demographic base, as a social-technological apparatus, doesn’t support your traditional persistent state world software and business model. According to Glenn, the $100, hard-drive enabled Final Fantasy XI for the PS2 is very much a niche product. Glen then explicitly asserted what Henson seemed to just assume: that the future of online console gaming is not the MMO as we generally know it but rather games that are not highly persistent, don’t need a hard drive, do not have a subscription (though micropayments are a possibility).

This argument didn’t entirely resonate for me: why are we so constrained by the PS2 as a hardware set? Broadband access is growing rapidly, and aren’t you guys building a new system? Still, the combination of perspectives brought some points home. The social communities that cohere around game worlds are likely to look and behave quite differently as online gaming expands. Assumptions about avatarial identity and social understandings will be complicated by systems where the relationships between player, player-as-character, and player-as-consumer are changed by the material and social apparatus that delivers the game world. And the worlds will change in kind.

Wow, these writeups take a long time. There’s plenty more from day 1… will try to write it up soon.