Meaningful Play, Meaningful Creation: A Critical Making Approach to Game Studies.

Games are inherently black-boxed — we experience them as a final product, never witnessing the complex processes of production and feedback that are weaved into their very essence. Unfortunately, this also means that our perspective of games have become trapped in a visual-driven focus that ignores the complexity of creation behind a game. While the processes of game creation are widely understood by the field, the impact of of that creation needs to be incorporated into the studies of games. Whether it is from the lack of technical knowledge to unravel the code of digital games, or a lack of access to the design processes (a very real problem, especially for game preservation scholars), game researchers have been forced to focus their efforts on finished products. What I intend to do here is to introduce the critical making approach to understand processes of creation and apply it to game studies. I will accomplish this by first probing the gaps in the field, then I will examine current examples of making research conducted through ethnography, and conclude with an example of critical making through reflection on one of my recent projects. This will allow us to unpack black-boxes and scratch at what goes into the making and constant remaking/co-creation of games. What we will draw from this exercise is that theory and practice put forward by critical making is quite applicable to game studies and needed to attain a more complete understanding of the complex nature of games.

Games Come in Black Boxes:

It is widely understood in the game studies field that games are iteratively produced and co-produced by their designers and players. Foundational works such as Rules of Play cement this notion of design, and ethnographies about virtual worlds have shown that these spaces are infused with producer economies that co-create the world. However, this understanding has not produced a system of practice for game studies that includes an in-depth examination of games beyond a “visualist, subjectivist, user-centred and immaterialist interpretations of games” (Cypher, Richardson, 2006: 2). This leaves games wrapped in the packaging of a seamless blackbox, which is taped closed by our screen-dominated gaze and hylomorphic conceptualization of creation.

Blackboxes come into being when we fail to investigate the systems and processes that breathe life into objects like games. Unless we are willing to shift our gaze, we will continue to be unable to unwrap blackboxes. To do this we need to first address that our perspective is confined by the blinders of a seamless, screen-based conceptualization of games. The games we interact with have appeared to “converge” into a seamless networked assemblage of artifacts, where we have game titles spanning different digital systems and mediums (Jenkins, 2006). This means that we negotiate our relationship with digital artifacts from a human-centred viewpoint (Cypher, Richardson, 2006: 3), relegating those artifacts to the standing reserve as “matters of fact”, rather than incorporating them into a more nuanced, shared existence in our lifeworld (Ratto 2014).

Star’s concepts of seamlessness and breakdown are critical components for understanding the blackboxing of games (1999). When we are able to engage with technology in an uninterrupted manner, carrying digital experiences across devices and mediums, our gaze never penetrates into the depths of the complex processes that allows that seamless convergence of technology to exist. Scholars have built upon Jenkins’ notion of convergence to argue that modders, indie developers, and AAA games are in an upward spiral towards convergence, where data and design flow from one title to the next between the hands of developers and consumers (2006). However, when things break down we can peer into the complex socio-technical world that these objects exist in. This is because “breakdown disturbs and sets in motion worlds of possibility that disappear under the stable or accomplished form of the artifact” (Jackson, 2014: 230).

Perhaps the most salient example of the breakdown in the seamlessness of games exists in current game download clients such as EA’s Origin and membership services like Ubisoft’s Uplay. Within one of these systems a user has immediate access to their games, can transfer those games across devices, maintain account details, and play games from any location. This seems to be the climax of a convergent medium, where the digital technologies are enabling the rapid transfer of data across devices for users and creators alike. Hand in hand with these benefits, however, is the encroachment of Digital Rights Management being proactively applied to users.

Unlike general legal enforcement, DRM is now being enforced on users before they could commit an illegal act. Similar to iTunes, the use of the digital content through these game clients is structured to enforce DRM. While these clients do provide wanted services, there has been a backlash to DRM measures such as requiring an internet access to login and play games, the scanning of non-related computer files by the clients, and the lack of individual ownership of digital titles when purchased through a client via a complex EULA. The shattering of the seamlessness has come to pass in recent years, as game companies push away from the user friendly Steam client to produce their own clients. The creation of clients like Origin and Uplay duplicate Steam services but wrap them up in company controlled systems of DRM enforcement and different user accounts. Coupled with separate game ecosystems for each game platform (one for XBOX, PS4, PC, and each mobile system), the promise of convergence is destroyed by the drive for profits and user control. These game clients are therefore additional layers of blackboxing around games, which configure the user by manipulating use cases, and proactively obstruct user rights through DRM under the false promise of seamless, convergence driven use.

Birthed from the Mind

Thus, games are blackboxed by how we use them, how they are sold to us, and how we perceive them. This blackboxing creates the illusion of seamlessness between games, devices, and platforms. This illusion is reliant on treating games as finalized objects of design, not as objects that were iteratively created. This perspective is known as Hylomorphic Model, which Tim Ingold describes as the skipping of generative, creative acts — where we go right from the design of an object straight to its existence as if it was birthed from the mind (2010).

Clearly, no one in the field of Game Studies actively believes that anything can be produced this way. However, studies by many scholars avoid becoming entangled with the messiness of the creative acts behind the games of their study. It is in the mess, the jagged edges, that we can explore the interwoven threads of making and and interactions between makers and their materials (Schon, 1987). Ingold calls this approach the “Textility of Making”, where the mess of creation becomes our object of study, where we can witness the ebb and flow of a generative act, and where we can begin to unpack the layers of blackboxes.

Virtual Worlds: Hives of Activity

Initial studies on the importance of making in games have already been carried out. Namely, the field of virtual world ethnography is actively exploring the role of user creation in an active virtual world. Studies on MUDs/MOOs, Second Life, Everquest, World of Warcraft, and Uru have all shown that virtual worlds are co-created worlds, with the role of user creation following a spectrum according to the openness of the virtual world’s rules system. This spectrum includes building new worlds from raw code (MOOs), designing property and artifacts (Second Life), to creating avatars and paratexts (all). In each of these cases, players participate in “ongoing generative movement” that engages them with the virtual world, each other, and the game designers in “hives of activities” (Ingold, 2010: 9).

However, the interpretive power of these ethnographies does not lie in simply accounting for the processes of making, but rather in their ability to take objects that we perceive to be “matters of fact” and convert them into “matters of concern” (Ratto, 2014). Specifically, through participant observation, researchers like Celia Pierce can experience the value and meaning of objects through their creation (2009). In Pierce’s ethnography of Uru, she witnesses a group of virtual world “refugees” attempt to rebuild a dead virtual world in a series of contexts (from scratch and in other games). In doing so they not only recreated their lost virtual world, but also reformed their own individual and community identity, redefined their connection to the objects of that world, while also engaging in co-creation with the wider player and game designer communities in their adoptive virtual worlds.

The hives of activity experienced by Pierce are echoed Dibbell’s personal account of LambdaMOO, a Multi-User Dungeon where the virtual world is created through lines of text. The flexible nature of such a virtual world allows anyone to make their own textual paradise, facilitating a fascinating co-created series of virtual worlds that are strung together through a complex geography of hyperlinks. For Dibbell, the experience of making his own world, which was eventually rejected by the community on account of its size (remember, this was in the 90s), echoes the importance of not just studying making and recording interviews from makers, but participating in the making processes and critically reflecting on it. The push and pull of making, especially with the constraints of disk space and an approval board, give us insight into how making is a itinerative (meaning iterative, but not planned, where the generation of variables during making feedback and change future action), generative process (Ingold, 2010). For Dibbell, and for us, it is in the mistakes, in the changes, and the feedback where we experience the “textility of making”.

A slightly new approach

Studying the role of making, or techne/craft as Tom Beollstorff (2008) identifies it, has been a long time endeavour of game studies within the context of an already existing game world. Game scholars have equally been interested in the making of games as well, performing studies on companies, developers, modders, and others during the process of creation.

Perhaps one of the most interesting scholars studying making practices in the game industry is Casey O’Donnell. As an ex game developer turned anthropologist, O’Donnell has been able to gain access to the development processes of games and conduct ethnographies. In 2011 O’Donnell published a paper detailing his results from an ethnography of a game studio producing Spider-man 3. In his research, O’Donnell realized that convergence did not exist as presented by Henry Jenkins, as a video game based on a movie was unable to incorporate most of the assets of the movie, while the game was also being produced by multiple companies for each of the different platforms and devices it was launched on. With access to making practices and a clear understanding of game production because of his background, O’Donnell was able to dismantle the hylomorphic understanding of produced games as convergence.

O’Donnell has since gone on to produce other ethnographic and academic works. Developer’s Dilemma, for example, is an important ethnography conducted in 2004 on rank and file game developers that illustrates the day to day work and culture (such as game talk) of those developers, while also showing just how divided the industry is because of their need to protect IP (2014).

While not all of us can be ex game developers and gain access to game studios, we can begin to formulate our own critical assessments of game development through the methodologies of critical making. Critical making is a reflexive endeavour where we, the researcher, can engage in the act of making and get hands deep in the jagged mess of an itinerative, creative act (Ratto, 2014). Critical making is specifically intended to decompress complex socio-political issues through the creation of simple prototypes. In the case of gaming, we can use the creation of simple games to explore the importance of several topics while allowing ourselves as game researchers to grow in our understanding of the messiness of creation.

Critical Reflection

Critical making is a useful approach that we can use to reflect on games, or to make games to explore a specific concept. In this case, I am going to reflect on a game I built this summer with my brother and another teammate, where we tried to learn how to build an online game with Ruby on Rails and React Javascript. The game took about three weeks to make, and has allowed me to reflect on the textility of making in the context of a group setting and aggressive deadline.

The game we ended up building was called Spectacula, which was an attempt to build a turn based digital board game where up to four players would control a character in gladiatorial arena. Each character would receive up to four instructions a turn, including an assortment of directional movements to navigate the orthogonal grid and an attack command to shoot across the map. The game would end when all but one player remained alive at the end of a round. As aspiring game designers, we wanted to use this game to not only learn about React, but also explore how we could stretch the concepts of the MOBA genre by recreating MOBA concepts in a turn based, board-game like context.

A simple game in its scope, Spectacula allowed us to delve into what one could do with the new Facebook version of Javascript, which uses reusable components for a more simplified (more simplified than other JS frameworks) design that moves away from traditional MVC frameworks. The promise of React was the ability to quickly prototype different parts of the game, and then encase the React powered game within a Ruby shell that would handle online connections and website. However, we were quite constrained in many of our programming choices, as Ruby on Rails is a programming environment designed to create CRUD apps, not digital games. Many of the features we wanted to implement had to be altered or scrapped entirely to work with our bastard hybrid between two, not really compliant, programming languages.

While frustrating at the times, making this game allowed us to recognize how creative endeavours, even in the “boundless” space of computer programming, are constrained and negotiated acts between maker and material. In this case, the “materials” we had chosen pushed back and generated new variables to influence further steps along the pathways of our itinerative attempts of creating a digital game. Illustrated in these moments of push back was our own connection to technology, where the materials stop being just “matters of fact” and become “matters of concern” as we became more aware and involved with them (Ratto, 2014).

This creative process also allowed us to think about the MOBA genre, and consider the importance of the appearance of a seamless surface between different systems in just one digital game. For example, while planning and building our minimum viable product (MVP), we became engaged in what aspects of a MOBA we would need to meet the requirements of an MVP. After several brainstorming and coding sessions, we had a firm idea of what we needed for the game: movement and attack; and what we needed for the website: game lobby, account and profile, leaderboards, and the systems to connect players. While obvious to any MOBA player, exploring and creating it ourselves allowed us to reflect on how this different parts worked together to create a more complete experience and fed into making a more satisfying MVP. Ultimately, our MVP worked in time for it to be presented to a large group, where it was vital that all the systems worked together seamlessly. What we knew from this experience was that the code underneath the hood was anything but seamless or hylomorphic, which was an important insight into the realities of game development.

From Here

The goal of this paper has been to explore how games and their development are shrouded in blackboxes through the processes that create them and how we interact with them. I put forward that one way we can shatter the seamless appearance of convergence of games is through the study of making in games, be it through analysis of making in virtual worlds, studying the making processes of game developers, or by undertaking a critical making approach in our own research. Going forward, the usefulness of critical making lies in our own ability to apply it to an increasing range of scenarios, such as using it to guide collaborative studies, game jams, or other research endeavours to explore specific topics (perhaps exploring if digital games have politics — ie do games cause violence?).

References

Boellstorff, T. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton University Press.

Cypher, M, Richardson, I. 2006 .An actor-network approach to games and virtual environments,In: CyberGames 2006: International Conference on Games Research and Development & IE 2006: The Third Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment (CGIE).

Dibbell, J. 1998. My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World. Lulu.com: http://www.lulu.com/shop/julian-dibbell/my-tiny-life-crime-and-passion-in-a-virtual-world/ebook/product-17492539.html

Ingold, T. 2010. “The Texility of Making”. Cambridge Journal of Economics, vol 30, no. 1, pp 91–103

Jackson, S. 2014. “Rethinking Repair,” in Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo Boczkowski, and Kirsten Foot, eds. Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality and Society. MIT Press: Cambridge MA.

Jenkins, H. 2006b. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

O’Donnel, C. 2011. “Games are not convergence: The lost promise of digital production and convergence”. Convergence: The international Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. 17(3): 271–286.

O’Donnel, C. 2014. Developer’s Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators. MIT Press: Cambridge MA.

Pierce, C. 2009. Communities of Play. Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds. MIT Press: Cambridge MA.

Ratto, Matt, Kirk Jalbert and Sara Wylie, eds. 2014. “Critical Making Special Forum Issue”, The Information Society 30.2

Schon, D. 1987. “Educating the Reflective Practitioner”, presenetation to the 1987 meeting of the American Educational Resaerch Association, Washington D. (Accessed February 2014)

Star, Susan. 1999. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure”. American Behavioral Scientist. 43 (3), pg. 377–391