The Games and Culture journal has announced its arrival and calls for papers. A most interesting and promising initiative.
Unrelatedly: What is this growing trend of people (again!) using MS Word as a web editor? Wasn’t that particular practice outlawed in late 1997?
Bragt som Analyse i Politiken, 9. april 2005.
Forleden udsendte American Psychological Association (APA) en ”resolution” hvori organisationen i skarpe vendinger kritiserede computerspilbranchen for ikke at være sig sit ansvar bevidst. APA understregede at årtiers forskning har påvist en sammenhæng mellem voldeligt medieindhold og aggressiv adfærd hos børn og unge.
Med sine 150000 medlemmer er APA verdens største psykolog-sammenslutning, så kritikken rammer hårdt. Den rammer end da på et tidspunkt hvor spilbranchen i forvejen er i defensiven. Hele sommeren har en serie af skandaler samt en hård og vedvarende kritik bragt sindene i kog hos både venner og fjender af branchen. Senest har flere amerikanske toppolitikere ført en heftig debat med spilproducenternes repræsentanter. Man er uenige om flere ting, men i særdeleshed toppes man om hvor problematiske vitterligt meget voldelige spil som Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas eller Doom III er.
På overfladen er spørgsmålet simpelt: Fører voldelige computerspil til voldelig adfærd hos spilleren? Lad os starte med resultaterne og derefter se på hvorfor det er så vanskeligt at nå til enighed om dette øjensynligt rimelige spørgsmål.
Så tidligt som i 1976 frembragte arkadespillet Death Race, hvori spilleren skulle køre tændstikfigurer ned, betydelig bekymring. Siden da har omkring 40 seriøse undersøgelser fokuseret på den eventuelle fare ved at spille computerspil med voldeligt indhold. Disse undersøgelser har, med enkelte undtagelser, lignet hinanden ganske meget.
I ”eksperimentelle” studier, indkalder man typisk to grupper af testpersoner. Den ene gruppe spiller et voldeligt spil, mens den anden spiller et ikke-voldeligt spil. Når de er færdige, måler man forsøgspersonernes aggressionsniveau og en forskel mellem de to grupper tilskrives forskellen på de to spil. Eksempelvis udsatte psykologerne Craig Anderson og Karen Dill i 2000 210 amerikanske psykologistuderende for enten det voldelige spil Wolfenstein 3D eller det betydeligt mere fredelige Myst. Herefter målte de deltagernes aggressionsniveau ved at måle intensiteten af en skarp lyd som den enkelte deltager anvendte til at straffe en modspiller i forbindelse med en lille konkurrence. Det viser sig i undersøgelsen at Wolfenstein 3D-spillerne uddelte de mest voldsomme lyde om end forskellen var beskeden.
I ”korrelationsundersøgelser” trækker man ikke testpersoner ind i et laboratorium. I stedet undersøger man eventuelle sammenfald mellem brug af voldelige spil og voldelig adfærd ved for eksempel at give en gruppe mennesker et spørgeskema hvorpå de beskriver deres spilvaner og aggressionsniveau. Det sidste kan ske ved at spørge hvor ofte de har været i et alvorligt skænderi eller i slagsmål indenfor en given tidsperiode. Ved denne type undersøgelser kan man ikke afgøre om en eventuel sammenhæng mellem voldelige spil og voldelig adfærd skyldes spillene eller om voldelige personer tiltrækkes af voldelige spil.
Det er sådanne undersøgelser, der ligger til grund for APA og andre organisationers udmeldinger om at alle og enhver nu må bøje sig for bevisets magt og erkende at der er en sammenhæng mellem voldelige spil og aggressiv adfærd. Ikke desto mindre eksisterer der en højlydt opposition, som går meget skarpt i rette med APAs konklusioner. Denne modpol, der interessant nok primært udgøres af kultur- og medieforskere, har en række problemer med folk som Anderson og Dill.
For det første beklikkes psykologernes dagsorden. Man spørger sig om ikke bekymringen skyldes en form for mediepanik, der rettes mod alle nye medier fra ældre generationer. Og man spørger sig om hele forsøget på at måle spillenes aggressivitetsfremmende effekt ikke mestendels er et forsøg på at finde en bekvem og simpel (bort)forklaring når middelklassens unge af og til gør sig skyldige i alvorlige voldsforbrydelser.
For det andet betvivles undersøgelsernes gyldighed. Det hævdes at laboratoriesituationen har uendeligt lidt at gøre med virkeligheden. I virkelighedens verden er computerspil, ligesom andre legeformer, en lystbetonet aktivitet som ofte har en stærk social komponent og hvor spilleren har stor kontrol over situationen. Dette kan slet ikke sammenlignes med en laboratoriesituation, hvor personer isoleres i fremmede omgivelser, udsættes for spil de ikke har valgt og konstant afbrydes af forskere måske inden de overhovedet har lært hvordan spillene fungerer. Endvidere er man ikke imponeret over kreative målemetoder a la straffelyden i Anderson og Dills undersøgelse.
Det kan virke besynderligt at fagorganisationer så store som APA ikke har svar på rede hånd over for kritik af så basale forhold. Men selvom kritikernes sag ikke altid er lige stærk er flere alvorlige kritikpunkter ikke imødegået. Endvidere er det værd at notere sig at APA, især i sine pressemeddelelser, balancerer på kanten af det forsvarlige. En APA-pressemeddelelse fik f.eks. Politiken 24/8 til at fremhæve en ”tæt” sammenhæng mellem voldelige spil og aggressiv adfærd hos børn. APAs belæg var en uformel artikel på fem sider, der formentlig primært er forfattet af en studerende.
Men hvad skal man mene, hvis man blot er almindeligt interesseret i sine børns fritidsbeskæftigelser eller af anden grund forpligtet til at mene noget konkret?
For det første kan man sige at der ingen direkte forbindelse er mellem et spils indhold og en konkret spillers adfærd. Det er ikke alle spillere af Grand Theft Auto som faktisk går ud og stjæler biler bagefter. En eventuelt statistisk sammenhæng er temmelig svag og afhængig af en stor mængde faktorer. På den anden side er det oplagt at spil jo faktisk påvirker spillere som kan blive ærgerlige, stakåndede, mere afslappede osv. Desuden er det væsentligt at holde sig for øje at når medieforskere kritiserer deres psykologkollegaer er kritikken typisk rettet mod dokumentationen og kan ikke opfattes som en egentlig afvisning af konklusionerne.
I sidste instans gives intet facit. Det skulle da lige være dette: Enhver skråsikker udtalelse om voldelige spils skadelighed kan med største sikkerhed siges at hvile på et aldeles usikkert grundlag.
En route for a substantial while, the “Spillets Verden” game studies anthology is now available in any moderately self-respecting bookstore near you (if you’re in Denmark, that is).
Yours truly contributed with an article on the history of game design, entitled “Rammer for en handling” (“Frameworks for a plot”). Draft version available online.
Are you a techie? I want to combine two video signals – one shows players in a couch, the other shows on-screen game action. And I want to do it with a minimum of post-recording hassle (I don’t care so much about the complexity of the set-up).
Right now, what I’m going for is two cameras – and then synching the two signals in Premiere and showing both signals at once in the final movie (as shown in the illustration).
If anyone has better ideas I would just love to hear them.
University of Bergen, Norway
October 14-15, 2005
We invite proposals for papers to be presented at the conference Aesthetics of Play, to be held at the University of Bergen 14-15 October 2005. The conference is hosted by the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, and is arranged in collaboration with Norway’s first game-art exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall.
We invite papers that address the diversity of cultural meanings as they are expressed in computer game technology and software. The notion of ‘aesthetics’ in this context is a broad one, encompassing the formal structures and audiovisual characteristics of games and game technologies as well as the wider epistemological, cultural and political dimensions of the gaming experience. Our aim is to contribute to the continued development of a cultural aesthetics of computer games, allowing us to better understand their role as mediators of cultural change. We especially want to encourage contributions that offer analytical ‘close-playings’ of particular games or genres. We invite a broad range of game-centred approaches, hoping to attract a rich mixture of highly focussed and particular investigations as well as broader more speculative work.
Areas of interest include but are not limited to:
– Game architectures. The analysis of formal, technological and narrative conventions of computer games
– The representations of society in contemporary game-worlds
– The epistemology of computer games
– The audiovisual aesthetics of computer games
– Theories and methods of game analysis
– Aesthetics and industrial imperatives
Abstracts of maximum 300 words should be submitted by 18 April, 2005 via the conference website http://www.aestheticsofplay.org.
Notice of acceptance will be sent out by 29 April, 2005.
Presenters will be asked to submit the full papers by 16 September, 2005.
All papers will be published in the online conference proceedings.
For more information visit the conference website at http:/www.aestheticsofplay.org or contact:
Eli Lea (eli.lea@uib.no) for practical or administrative inquiries
Rune Klevjer (rune.klevjer@infomedia.uib.no) for academic inquiries
Carrying on my interest in trust and signaling, I just finished reading Amotz and Avishag Zahavi’s “The Handicap Principle“.
Briefly, the handicap principle is the idea that to send a trustworthy signal one sometimes has to accept a handicap. Taking on this handicap proves to the receiver of the signal that the transmitted statement is true.
For instance, in order to convince a skeptical observer that you’re a world-class swimmer you may have to get wet. You could choose to just say it (“Seriously, I am a world-class swimmer”). But that signal would not be reliable.
Similarly, the Zahavis argue that the male peacock lugs around his beautiful tail (handicapping himself since he is more easily spotted, less agile etc.) in order to reliably signal to the female that he is made of strong genetic material. He could have “told” her in other ways, but the tail is an unfakable signal.
There’s a decent intro to the theory of honest signaling here.
Now, Geoffrey Miller, reviewing the book for Evolution and Human Behaviour said it well:
“Depending on your viewpoint, they [the Zahavis] act like (1) dangerous hyper-adaptationists even more extreme than Steven Jay Gould?s worst caricatures of Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett, weaving just-so stories out of thin air, (2) harmlessly entertaining, pseudo-scientific fabulists in the tradition of Sigmund Freud and Margaret Mead, (3) classical Victorian natural historians (somehow displaced to contemporary Tel-Aviv University) using the same hypothetico-deductive methods as Darwin himself, or (4) ardent, creative biologists who, whatever one?s qualms about their methods and examples, deliver a revitalizing shock to animal communication theory, sexual selection theory, kinship theory, reciprocal altruism theory, and evolutionary psychology. “
Miller adds, as I would have done from the comfort of my layman’s armchair: “I favor this last judgment“.
Anyway, many aspects of the book are fascinating (as are the author’s regular jibes at colleagues who spend too much time arguing against the “obvious” using fancy mathematical models and too little time in the real world).
But two sections struck me as particularly interesting. My limited understanding of evolutionary biology had it that there are essentially two complementary explanations of cooperation among animals (discounting group selection theories that are frowned upon).
The first is kin selection (and the related idea of inclusive fitness). Here, the idea is that individuals should behave altruistically to the extent that other individuals share their genes (or to the extent that other individuals are likely to share your genes). And what-do-you-know? Parents often care about their offspring.
The second is reciprocal altruism. Here, the individual is expected to be altruistic to the extent that he or she expects this altruism to be reciprocated in the future. So, a vampire bat should share its meal with another bat if it believes that this other bat will reciprocate the favor. And Hallejujah! This seems to be the case.
I was somewhat surprised to see that the Zahavis consider both theories to be flawed. Kin selection, the Zahavis argue, is really just group selection among relatives. It may be true that an individual “would like” to increase its inclusive fitness, but wouldn’t it just be much better if your brother did the work instead of you? So, kin selection is vulnerable to social parasitism (the bane of group selection theories).
Reciprocal altruism, on the other hand, seeks to explain something which does not really warrant such fancy models, the Zahavis feel. Many individuals gain prestige by performing altruistic acts, which increasestheir standing in the hierarchy, which increases their reproductive success. Altruism, then, is a signal of superiority – look!, I can share my food, that’s how strong a bird I am (marry me!).
Very interesting even if I don’t entirely know what to think.
The good people of Digra would like me to write and talk about The problem of other players – in-game collaboration as collective action in June.
[You may be looking for my list of project writing advice]
If you’re a Danish speaking/writing undergraduate student and feel less than 100% confident of your project writing skills, by all means consult Rienecker and Jørgensen’s book “Den Gode Opgave – opgaveskrivning på videregående uddannelser”. This book is full of excellent observations and great advice.
Most early video games, of course, were multiplayer games. Games like Spacewar, Pong and Gunfight, however, were also simple one-on-one games in the tradition of classical board games such as chess. At the formal level, at least, such games do not inspire cooperation since one player’s gain is the other player’s loss.
Following the simplistic and competitive successes of Pong later games introduced the possibility of cooperative play. Two schools of thought competed for quarters and screen time. In games of the 1980s like Joust (Williams, 1982), Double Dragon (Taito, 1987) players could join forces against the enemy hordes but were also likely to be unstable allies as players were able to directly hurt one another (Double Dragon even ultimately employed last man standing scoring conditions. as players would fight each other for the glory of actually winning the game). Eliminating much potential for inter-player conflict Gauntlet (Atari, 1985) and its descendants cast players in complementary roles that needed to be handled appropriately for the group to succeed.
Such experiments were obviously predecessors of the team-based Counter-Strike and are evident in many other highly popular online PC games such as Return to Castle Wolfenstein (Gray Matter Interactive Studios, Inc., 2001) and Battlefield 1942 (Digital Illusions CE AB, 2002).
In terms of gameplay (disregarding for now the broader social context in which the game exists) those games all invite social tension albeit on a modest scale. In the case of in-game resources (health potions in Gauntlet, special weapons in Double Dragon) each player may be tempted to simply gobble up as many goodies as possible. And the Battlefield 1942 player may feel the urge to indulge in personal military heroics (such as semi-suicidal air-raids) without bothering with the carefully pondered strategies of her team. This tension, however, may clearly be part of the appeal and cannot feasibly be countered without seriously jeopardizing the enjoyable player freedom offered and enthusiastically flaunted by the game worlds in question.
A remarkably different approach to game design was displayed in 1978 when Rob Trubshaw and Richard Bartle wrote the lines of code that was MUD. The system drew inspiration from earlier adventure games as well as pen-and-paper role-playing but what should interest us here is the fact that MUD was, in effect if not by intent, an experiment with social dynamics in game worlds.
Being multiplayer at heart, MUD was a virtual world in which players pursued individual goals but also shared the responsibility of keeping the world useful and enjoyable. Thus, the cooperation required by the players here is analogous to the joined effort that must be undertaken by members of real-life societies. In an important sense, then, the task of the game world designer is comparable to that of the political philosopher, attempting to describe institutions that ensure the desired levels of freedom, fairness and happiness. Experienced virtual world designer, Raph Koster, who co-manages Sony’s MMORPG Star Wars Galaxies acknowledges this:
‘I think anyone who doesn’t think that MMOs are social experiments hasn’t tried
running one yet. It’s not that you set out to create a social experiment-we don’t have test plans for our subjects, formal hypotheses to prove, or anything like that. You set out to make a game, and quickly discover that you’re suddenly a politician running a game the size of a city. You’re suddenly a social architect worrying about issues you never had a clue about.’ (quoted in Pika, 2004)
Although designers of pioneer virtual worlds such as Habitat were specific about the difficulties of reconciling the preferences of various player types (Morningstar & Farmer, 2003) many subsequent systems apparently did not fully anticipate the potential tensions between users/players. Famously, Ultima Online, in its initial incarnation, did very little to discourage anti-social behaviour among its citizens. Thus, the game world soon became rampant with grief play, a term now used to cover various types of deliberately anti-social behaviour (see discussion in Foo & Koivisto, 2004). Particularly the number of players who enjoyed preying on other players reached levels where other types of play (i.e. advancing through the game’s craft system) became hard to enjoy (Kim, 1998) as the game world began to resemble ‘Afghanistan after the Soviets left‘ (Rollings & Adams, 2003 527). The mounting in-game tension was attributed to the game’s design. In this spirit it was decided to graphically single out player-killers and to designate certain areas of the game world as safe. Thus, player-killers would be marked by a red aura and it was no longer possible to die at the hand of another player in Ultima’s urban areas. It other words, while Ultima Online did not eliminate player-killing on the code level (as many of its successors have done) the game had raised the stakes involved in blatantly anti-social behaviour, which was soon notably diminished.
Killing another player character in Ultima Online, of course, is arguably not against the spirit of the game. In a medieval world populated by monsters and assassins the case can obviously be made that killing is actually in-character, i.e. consistent with the role one has chosen to play. Such arguments fare more poorly when it comes to technical cheats. A pervasive problem in online gaming has been the creativity put to use by some players in order to exploit bugs in the games or to gain various advantages by tinkering with the game code. A measure of the problem can be gained by the proclamation by game developers Blizzard in September 2003 that they would shut down 400.000 user accounts at their game portal Battle.net. These accounts had been associated with ‘a hack or a cheat program‘ and were eliminated to ensure that the portal would remain ‘a fun and safe place to play Blizzard games’ (Battle.net, 2003).
If games were all about conflict, grief play and technical cheats would not receive such intense attention and would not give game designers sleepless nights as they attempt to foresee the next counter-move by ingenious (if immoral) players. Notably, no developer sleep is lost over the intentional conflict manifest in the aggressions of Tekken players or the drive towards mutual destruction in real-time-strategy games. Such discord is intentional and entertaining while social dilemmas emerging from human interaction are often not.
