Tag Archives: games

Understanding Video Games – Week 9 – Sexuality

The PolyBlog
May 20 2018

Week 9 of the MOOC introduces the theme of sexuality and how it is explored in video games.

In video 1, they focus on the first games that introduced sexuality — adventure games like Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork. Or how most of the text adventure games were relatively straightforward, yet Japan started introducing some sexual role-playing content with Night Life while America was still playing Kings Quest by Sierra. But mostly the video is about the development history of text games from basic parsers to added parsing, added exploration, added audio, added graphics, and expanded narrative arcs. It’s an okay start, but mostly it is just to give you the background so they can then talk about:

  1. The history of sex in gaming
  2. Five ways to imagine sex in gaming
  3. Role of women in the industry

The second video talks about the examples of how it is introduced:

  • marketers using sex to “sell” to generally single heterosexual males;
  • designers including sex content (Sierra’s Soft Porn Adventure and eventually Leisure Suit Larry);
  • exploration of gender through cyber-sex roles; and,
  • creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) as reactions to games with sex and/or violence.

Interestingly, while some of the big FPS games like Doom do have strong male markets, other games with bigger audiences — Myst, Sims, Farmvilles — have much bigger female markets. But those markets are often dismissed as not “real video games”.

The third, fourth and fifth videos introduce five ways sex and sexuality can appear in games:

a. Sex as an abstraction — namely as a simplified representation, to reduce explicitness, and to add rationality and linear logic for game play, with similar approaches to how it is done in film, literature and advertising;

b. Sex as a game goal — using lust as a motivation (such as an early strip poker game), and with little diversity in the target market (where the gamer objectifies and identifies with sexualized game characters, namely white men pursuing women);

c. Sex as a mechanic (part of design) — some games make the character’s sex irrelevant while others make it explicit, but not necessarily obviously (such as Super Mario Brothers 2 where the male characters are stronger and faster than Princess Peach who can float), but there are some other still who use sex and gender to create a sense of agency;

d. Sex as an aesthetic (part of gamer experience) — some games are heteronormative (with assumptions of inherent differences matching societal perceptions) in their gamer experience, and while important, there’s also the risk of objectification, such as is argued by Lara Croft’s outfits and proportion in the Tomb Raider series; and,

e. Sex as emergent gameplay — some players have imported outside constructions like online weddings into an MMO game, but this pales in comparison to Second Life (with sold services, toys and club memberships).

For the role of women in the industry, they note that women not only play games, they also critique and make games. And while 45% of gamers are female (although that stat includes a bunch of games that some gamers don’t really consider games at all), only 11% of production crew are women, which goes even lower when you exclude HR, admin, etc. and focus on engineering or designers.

Overall, it was a solid week, just not with much depth. In most places, it just lightly touches on the concepts. Which was disappointing. For example, I expected them to talk about Tomb Raider, and they did; however, they could use TR as an entire study in and of itself, with some pretty complex elements. They don’t even mention the agency aspect that you have a strong female character as the protagonist, smart, attractive, strong…a bad ass who makes Indiana Jones look wimpy. They only cover the superficial controversy, without much attention paid to the counter-argument (although they do mention the puzzle-solving aspects). Grumble, grumble.

I’m also disappointed with the timing of the original recording. But they recorded all their stuff (I think) before #GamerGate started (2014), and so there is no mention of it at all. They mention in passing that there are those who face some harassment online, but it is a throwaway line at most. Obviously if they were doing the same pieces now, GamerGate would likely figure prominently in a discussion of women in the industry.

In the meantime, two more weeks to go…

Understanding Video Games – Week 8 – Violence and video games

The PolyBlog
May 16 2018

I’m still plugging away on this MOOC. Week 8 of  “Understanding Video Games” (hosted by Leah Hackman and Sean Gouglas through Coursera) starts off talking about violence in early games and begins with the old platform games (i.e. jumping to or swinging from platforms), ranging from Donkey Kong (static screens) through to Super Mario Brothers (scrolling), and on further into cinematic platform games. Even the cartoonish games attracted concerns of parental groups who wanted to limit ages or locations for arcades.

In the second video, the pair talk about blood and gore, and it’s long artistic roots in art as an aesthetic. They then move on to flagging the different interpretations — gory violence as nothing more than a video game “horror movie” experience; gory violence as a murder simulator; or merely a source of catharsis. Yet it is the same questions that have been posed of art, comic books and television too. In the end, violence can be seen as either gratuitous or as an ingredient to drive a narrative story arc (such as the need to resolve conflict or overcome strategic or tactical challenges).

The third and fourth videos focus on consequences and morality. As a starting point, they assume that there is feedback to all actions in a game, including violent ones, and then look at the cost or reward for committing violent acts, including:

  1. Punishment for attacking “non-player characters” (NPCs) such as Ultima III;
  2. Rewards for attacking NPCs (Crusaders);
  3. Mixed punishments and rewards with competing mechanics (Grand Theft Auto 3);
  4. Mixed mechanics where emergent play (setting your own goals) decides the reward or punishments; or,
  5. Complex mechanics of moral choices (such as avoid, talk their way out, bribe the NPCs, or fight) with differing narrative outcomes, or rewards (the “clean hands” achievement for finding a non-violent solution).

However, some games use “gating” techniques — i.e. you can’t get to the next area until you satisfy the previous area’s requirements in a specific way. In many of these games, there are no “pacifist” solutions. Usually, this is the default option for any game that has a boss.

Watching the video, I was reminded of my first time playing Syphon Filter…there are two levels that are “gated”. In one, you have to kill terrorists to rescue hostages. And no matter what you try to do to stop the one bad guy, he would always end up killing the hostage and the level would reset. Unless you did one very specific thing — killed him with a sniper rifle shot to the head. No headshot, no advancement. A short while later in the game, another level required you to go through the whole level without setting off any alarms. But there were so many guards, the only way to get close to your objective was to repeatedly use headshots to eliminate bad guys. No headshots, no advancement.

The fifth video delves into the idea of the degree of photo-realism to the violence. I found it interesting the example of Mortal Kombat 2 — it was initially viewed as gratuitous violence, yet is now viewed as relatively over-the-top cartoonish violence. However, with increasingly realistic physics mechanics (destructible buildings, bullet trajectories, etc.), the immersive experience increases.

This leads to the final video for the week, dealing with how academia has studied video game violence. It identifies three common threads in the discussion:

  1. Playing video games can cause desensitization to real violence;
  2. Playing causes players to act aggressively;
  3. The more graphic, the more likely they are to be aggressive.

The focus though is on two research questions — does it increase the likelihood of violence and/or decrease empathetic behaviour? The main approach in academia is to rely on social learning theory aka mimicry. The humanities may also look at the political, moral, and cultural aspects of violence and video games. However, some academics identify multiple methodological problems with the research, such as:

  1. Ethical design issues;
  2. Choice of undergraduates as the sample guinea pig;
  3. Lax and flexible definitions of what actually constitutes violent and non-violent mechanics, and how to separate/isolate the violent parameter;
  4. Impossibility to test for real-life violent behaviour in an experiment; and,
  5. Journals have systemic biases towards publishing negative results.

Overall for the week’s videos, I expected more direct reference to situations like Columbine in the U.S. as one of the “hot button” examples that media pundits like to reference. I was also disappointed that they didn’t explore a bit more of the argument by some psychologists that video gameplay was not causal of aggression but more likely symptomatic of aggressive tendencies. In other words, aggressive people were likely to play violent games and commit violent acts, not as cause and effect but as a series of symptoms of their aggression.

Understanding Video Games – Week 7 – The culture of video games

The PolyBlog
December 29 2017

It has been some time, eighteen months in fact, since I viewed any of the materials for the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) called “Understanding Video Games”. It was hosted by Leah Hackman and Sean Gouglas through Coursera and affiliated for credit with the University of Alberta. I say “was” because the course was removed from Coursera’s offerings at some point during that last 18 months. I’m not sure when exactly, but when Coursera changed their website some time ago, and the links were all going to change, I downloaded all the videos to make sure I didn’t lose them and I wanted to enable offline viewing anyway. However, it was fortunate I did because when the course offering disappeared, so did all the materials. This means while I still have all the remaining videos, and they’re probably sufficient for my purposes, I don’t have the syllabus outline or the extra reading materials for the week. Sheesh, hard to believe that a course I started two years ago isn’t automatically still available to my free-loading audit viewing, right? 🙂 I don’t even have the official title for the week either, so from here on in, it is more my “estimated” title.

Week 7 started with an explanation that up until now, most of the discussion was about “what” constituted a game. And there was a surprising amount (to me) of solid academic theory in there. Actual rigour in fact. However, this week relies heavily on cultural studies approaches, trying to look at “who” plays video games, and I found the limitations of the approach is as much about the content as it is about the limitations of cultural studies in general.

I went to Trent University, and it has one of the biggest and best cultural studies programs in Canada (at least, I think it is still one of the biggest and best…at one point, it was the only REAL program that had a full offering of courses as a specialization instead of a minor). And some of my administrative and policy studies courses were cross-listed with cultural studies courses, so the cultural studies approaches were often woven into the curriculum.

So here’s the rub for me. Cultural studies, like history or anthropology, have to mainly observe from outside of the culture. The obvious rationale is that this is a good thing, an ability to see broad themes by having a more distant and objective perspective. However, for me, that is also an extreme limitation. If you aren’t part of the culture, immersed in it, and explaining things within that culture, the best you can do is an abstraction. That’s not limited to cultural studies, of course, any academic study requires some abstraction to hold everything else steady while you look at a couple of key issues or variables, but I find it difficult to accept the cultural studies one as readily. Partly because interpreting another culture only works if you first understand the culture well enough to step back, and that act of stepping back hides meaning, particularly when it is then combined with a translation process to “transcode” those observations into something those not of the culture can understand.

Take for example a situation where you’re observing the interactions between genders in a village. It’s easy to misunderstand hierarchies if you assume that hearth and home are “lesser” responsibilities than breadwinning employment — it is almost impossible to avoid some bias in the interpretation process. Descriptions are easy, interpretation and translation are best guesses as to why or for what significance.

I really liked the description the hosts give to the culture at the beginning i.e. that the culture includes not only the members themselves, but a specialized language, sense of community, identity representation of self and others, and how they relate to each other. Right down to defining who is “in” and who is “out”. As well, they talked about how you might look back at the history of gaming consoles and group them or “rank” them…would it be by the amount of memory, type of graphics, simplicity or complexity of controllers, the addition of narratives, etc.? And thus it is incredibly important to understand something within the context.

However, I don’t think they go quite far enough in critical analysis of the tool (cultural studies). If you accept that you need to understand within a context, and that you need to speak the language to understand the context, then any translation outside that context will necessarily involve at least some loss of meaning. To me, that sometimes moves the analysis into the realm of subjectivity or simple descriptive relativism. One analyst could argue it means X, another could argue it means Y, but neither one really knows if that is an accurate translation. As with all languages, some words have no direct counterpart, and idioms / symbols / signs are the hardest to translate at all.

In the videos for the week, they had a pretty solid opening to describe the culture of first-person shooters for example. And the definition of what those who play video games would describe as a “gamer” (time spent, frequency, places, platforms).

However, there were three areas at the end that I found were lost opportunities for deeper dives. The first was the role of “modding” in the culture. How extensive is it? Does it represent 2% of the so-called gamer community or 20%? There was very little indication of scope, and so as an artifact of the culture, the modification of hardware and software, or the motives for doing so from total conversion to patches, from remakes to demakes, from cheat codes to plugins, remain just artifacts…descriptive, not analytical.

Equally, the description of the change in commercial distribution channels with the growth of Indies has some amazing parallels with the music industry, Kickstarter campaigns for inventions, and self-publication through Amazon, yet received a pretty light touch without much comparative analysis. Even more definitive mapping out some of the changes in distribution vs. new production techniques vs. simple evolution (shareware to apps) would have been helpful.

Last, but not least, I find it difficult to understand their limited analysis and coverage of COS players. If you want to understand a culture, one of the most basic tools of cultural studies is to look at ways in which they express themselves for both artistry and identity. And the physical embodiment of a video game character would seem to be the ultimate form of that expression. For some, it is simply a creative challenge — can you make a costume or do the makeup? For others, it is an opportunity for role play and to experience the game in a different way, not by actually immersing oneself into the game’s reality, but by bringing that reality into the broader world. And for some, it is simply Hallowe’en costume play. Yet there are people who can do it for a living — they’re booked and paid to attend in various costumes at ComicCon, they pose as models for photographers, they travel around the world doing it. And yet it is only a throwaway topic in this week’s videos, which I found a bit disappointing. It’s a dangerous area for mass misinterpretation, but still, I would have liked to see more on it.

I can’t help but agree with the hosts. In the end, it feels like we tend to have more of a corporate history of gaming rather than a social or cultural history of gaming.

Understanding Video Games – Week 6 – How To Interpret Games

The PolyBlog
June 14 2016

Week 6 of “Understanding Video Games”, a University of Alberta Course offered by Leah Hackman and Sean Gouglas through Coursera, focuses on how to interpret/analyze a game with 5 videos this week.

Overall, the premise is that massive multiplayer online games are ripe for study given the richness of information and diversity of players. The videos walk through the beginnings of MMOs with multi-user dungeon games (MUDs), and how MMOs added to it with advanced GUI and recognizable visual settings. In particular, Hackman and Gouglas work their way through Ultima (which added both positive social interactions and negative ones such as griefing), Everquest (innovation through adding 3D interfaces, but also led to selling characters in the real world and early references to online addictions), Second Life (showing that it wasn’t all about weird fantasy worlds), and the true powerhouse, World of Warcraft.

Back in Week 1, we learned about a variety of elements in games and Week 2 focused on how “games” differ from simple “play”. Week 3 introduced the contrast between linear, progressive gameplay and more emergent gameplay brought to it by the various players. Week 4 introduced us to a mechanical structure of how to break down games into component pieces, and Week 5 tried a narrative approach to explaining games.

This week stepped back a bit and pulled from literary theory to talk about a structural way of analyzing games and the interrelationships between the parts starting with:

  1. Hardware, program code
  2. Functionality
  3. Gameplay
  4. Meaning of a game (relying on semiotics, signs and symbols)
  5. Referentiality (and how it represents a genre or crosslinks to other games and game types)
  6. Socio-culture (how it fits within the outside world or what is brought to the game by players).

Again relying on literary theory, they add in “post-structuralism” tropes and how language defines reality, and thus a question about what can the language of a game tell you about the designer’s beliefs, arguments, views of reality, etc.? In particular, they talk about procedural rhetoric (rules, interactivity, language, mechanics to make an argument) and how the rules reflect the world view of the game designer.

However, for me, I am not convinced it is about a world view, so much as it is a slice of a world view, particularly as meaning is more than just the rules (i.e. as they note, it also includes play and agency). More importantly, when they talk about WWII fight simulators, and about what is missing due to focusing entirely on technology, I’m not convinced it represents a denial of the other pieces, just that the other pieces don’t make for interesting or fun gameplay. Often it is easier to set warfare on strange alien planets just to avoid controversy around “supposed meaning” rather than the intent of the designer which is to have warfare, but without the political arguments that might creep into the discourse, and distract from what is meant to be simpler gameplay, not a debate.

Understanding Video Games – Week 5 – Story and Games

The PolyBlog
June 7 2016

Week 5 of “Understanding Video Games”, a University of Alberta Course offered by Leah Hackman and Sean Gouglas through Coursera, focuses on “stories and games” with 7 videos.

  1. Role-playing Games (14:16) — This is an overview of RPGs in general, including D&D, Ultima, Quest for Glory, Final Fantasy, etc. to illustrate sweeping storylines with common structural building blocks (character, plot, genre). For me, I’m more interested in the story elements of the game (narratology) over the game mechanics (ludology).
  2. Character (7:16) — This video explain the analytical framework from standard literary concepts (protagonist hero, antagonist villain, tritagonist third person narrator/expositor or sidekick). Pretty basic.
  3. Plot (19:21) — This video elaborates the framework to go from chronicle (facts) to plot where events are linked and show causation, but not necessarily linearly (more so on average than other forms of entertainment). It also argues that you can use the classic 3-part (beginning, middle, end) or 5-part dramatic arc (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement). However, there is a really cool interview with a Mass Effect writer and how they handled multiple branching storylines (it’s an illusion using two people who are always the drivers of a conversation, and the third wheel can be any other character who may or may not join the conversation, but allows the illusion of total differentiation based on which characters survive to that scene vs. the reality that it is still tightly controlled narrative/dialogue).
  4. Genre (4:15) — It’s a very short video, mostly to introduce the idea of viewers/players bringing certain expectations to certain genres, and the ability to suspend disbelief. Pretty basic.
  5. The Hero’s Journey (29:22) — The big video is an overview of Joseph Campbell’s male-dominated monomyth, which serves as a for growth. The monomyth has three main components…the departure (call to adventure, refusal of the call and punishment like woman-in-the-refrigerator, supernatural aid, crossing the threshold / overcome guardian, and belly of the whale), the initiation (road of trials with everything familiar gone to allow capacity development, meeting with the powerful goddess and getting a gift and/or experiencing love, the temptress to give it up, atonement with the father, apotheosis/acceptance of terrible truth with sacrifice, ultimate boon to achieve inner peace), and the return (refusal of the return, magic flight, rescue from without, crossing the return threshold to show independence, master of two worlds, and accept reward/freedom to live). While I see the truth of the criticisms of the model (default male-orientation, the open-endedness as it includes everything, and its misuse as prescriptive storytelling), it’s a pretty powerful story arc for the true “hero’s journey”.
  6. Games Aren’t Books (17:37) — The video raises the question of how interactivity can violate literary theory, such as Campbell’s monomyth while noting that all media is interactive in some form.
  7. Branching Narrative (8:39) — This video gives an overview of hypertext fiction/interactive fiction/ text-based adventures linked to the development of branching narratives.

Overall, the two big pieces I liked this week was Campbell’s breakdown, partly as a huge majority of games follow the hero’s journey arc, and the interview with the software designer and how they faked some aspects of differentiation and customization/interactivity.