Woot! The end is nigh. One more day to go in the 2007 Women in Games Conference. This year’s programme has been excellent, and we’ve witnessed the greatness of The Big Game, Performance of Play, Non-Games and Other Players. Tonight’s the Conference Dinner and tomorrow morning we’ve got the final session, Situated Play/ers. Here’s the lowdown on what you can look forward then:
Playing with Female Sociality. An exploration of identity, pleasure and power within and outside videogames.
Laura Fantone, Istituto Universitario Orientale, Naples
This paper presents a case study of some female characters in videogames (Sims and Second Life), starting from the assumption that videogames have the ability to create identities that have an impact outside of cyberspace.
The focus of the paper is on the ‘real’ consequences of video games on the perception of gender and desire. I argue that game characters, especially in their gender dimensions, are informed by and at the same time inform the identities of female players.
First, this paper will give a background on the double effects of empowerment and of sexualisation of women characters, as a result of the success of Lara Croft and similar figures (defined Female Bobs by Anne Marie Schleiner). The creation of a generation of superheroes who are female in a world (cyberspace) often perceived as dominated by men, or rather male-centered scenarios, is in itself useful to contextualize the current characters imaginary. These recurrent emerging themes connect power and pleasure. I will especially look here at some connections between reality and cyberspace, namely, pleasure in cyberspace and its effects on identification and performance (in all their multidirectionality) with female characters, and at the ways this relationships links back to reality, shaping identity, imagination and the gender performance of female players.
The theoretical conceptions of power and desire used here draw from a foucaltian perspective and a feminist reading of videogames, as sites capable of providing new possibilities of embodiment, pleasure and gendered subjectivities. These views are useful in outlining the deep connections among desire and role-play, subjectivity and societal hierarchies. The case of female videogame players, and their choice of performing in a game with a gendered character ultimately emerge as a complex empowerment issue.
Secondly, in the light of such concepts of power and identity, the game Second Life will be analyzed as an example of sociality and spontaneity, thus providing a more acceptable morality than other games (less shootings, no death), and specifically aimed adults rather than teenagers. In a videogame like Second Life, cyber-pleasure spaces are created, owned and accessed in negotiated ways, always carrying a gendered dimension. Female and male players are invested in the creation of real social life in cyberspace, based on their creative abilities to invent their own cyber-personas and interact with others outside of the gendered boundaries of real life. Some research on game players demographics shows that women gamers favor social interaction and cooperation over competitive game play. In this light, the paper will discuss how gender takes shape in such a new gaming environment, giving special attention to new aspects emerging in Second Life and other ‘sociality’ games. If Second Life certainly gives an obvious emphasis on recreating a cyber-social life, a feature found equally in other recent videogames, the deeper question worth investigating is:
Where is pleasure? What gendered forms does pleasure take in such game? Who plays with what assumptions on gender?
In the final section of the paper two cases will be briefly outlined, Her Interactive and Lime Life, game companies producing games aimed specifically at women, with a substantial presence of women on their staff. Lime Life released a widely successful mobile phone videogame called “Girls’ Night Out Solitaire”, which seems to provide an interesting space to analyze, where female players perform female characters. These two cases outline the fact that games do not necessarily assign women new roles or create ‘feminist’ characters. In the light of these considerations, the paper will conclude with some remarks on the contradictory ways in which female identity is changed and at the same time reproduced stereotypically in the abovementioned games.
Ambient role playing games: towards a grammar of endlessness
Mark Eyles, University of Portsmouth, UK
If the seminal 1976 ambient music album Music for Airports (Eno, 1978) became a 21st century ambient role playing game, what would it play like? What technologies would be required? What would we need to know for this to happen? Who would be the target audience?
This paper sets out to define ambient role playing games. A computer role playing game definition is suggested; the evolution of ambient technologies is outlined and a prototyped ambient game is described.
The heart of ambient gaming is embodied in Brian Eno’s description of ambient music as being ‘ignorable as it is interesting’ (Eno, 1978). This is compared and contrasted with pervasive gaming (Waern), alternate reality gaming (Borland, 2005) and augmented reality gaming (such as ARQuake (Thomas, 2002)). There are many computer role playing games and a description of this genre is developed.
The roots and history of role playing games from Gilgamesh, Kriegspiel (Michael, 2005) and Lord of the Rings to Dungeons and Dragons (Hallford, 2001) and more recently World of Warcraft (Blizzard, 2006) give a route to one possible genre definition. This definition is combined with case studies that are used to derive universal properties of computer role playing games. This definition and these properties are then used as a basis for a set of role playing gameplay mechanisms that are then processed through the ambient game definition to give a prescription for a first ambient role playing game. The technology required for true ambient gaming is described by looking at the history of ubiquitous computing (Weiser, 1996) and showing how this is leading to an ambient intelligence technology that features transparent, intelligent interfaces (Aarts, Harwig, Schuurmans, & Denning, 2001).
Finally the development and deployment of an ambient role playing game prototype is described and future audiences and applications of this technology are suggested, with particular reference to possible requirements of ambient gaming women.
Baring the Device – sense-making in digital games
Doris Rusch, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Those who fear the possible dangers of games and those who see games as a way to better society have one thing in common: a severe lack of knowledge about how games convey meaning and express ideas.
Here are some of my thoughts on the matter, dealing with the medial characteristics of games and how they might influence sense-making. This abstract presents some iedas of a work in progress and shall be understood as explorative, aimed at inspiring discussion rather than providing answers.
One obstacle digital games are facing at the moment on the way to become more meaningful is the trend to camouflage their game-ness. Across many genres (genre-based design as such hindering innovation) physical immersion seems to be key, the feeling of walking in the shoes of the hero, seeing through the eyes of the heroine. But games are media, thus the interaction with the game-world can never be immediate. Also, the development of artificial intelligence still has to go a long way before e.g. talking to a non-player character (NPC) can create the illusion of a talking to another real person. There is and always will be a gap between game and player and trying to deny it is problematic, because it limits the thematic and experiential scope of games. Why?
Because to create the feeling of presence, games focus on the feeling of immediacy rather than their reflective potential. Thinking about the wii, the new trick seems to be not to draw the player into the world but to get the game into the living room. Still the goal is the same: to blur the boundary between real and virtual space. The way to achieve this is a controller that enables a strong and wide variety of physical analogies between real-world input and on-screen action. This sort of interaction category is the most intuitive, but since it is based on physical analogies, it can only refer to physical actions.
If your goal is to produce deeply moving, thought provoking experiences, how far do you get with this interaction category alone? Especially when the enormous immediacy of the game-play tends to shove context-material aside, turning game-play activities into abstract problems. As King and Krzywinska have observed that in heightened states of play “contextual background is likely to be reduced to the more distant background, the gameplay situation taking the shape of an abstract problem to be overcome rather than one that retains much in the way of contextual depth.” (King & Krzywinska 2006, p. 68).
To make more aspects of the game-world tangible to the player, not only its physical qualities, other translation processes have to be explored. Interesting game design is the art of abstraction, of identifying the characteristic elements of an experience or process and translating these elements to the player, so they can be understood and felt.
This translation process has a huge and game-specific potential for generating meaning. Experiencing how a persuasive dialogue can be translated into a strategic card game as done in the diplomacy game in the new MMPORG Vanguard teaches us something about the “metaphors we live by”, to quote Lakoff. There is not a physical analogy between the real-world input and on-screen action, but there is an analogy on a cognitive and emotional level.
The process of crafting items in Everquest 2 is another example of how a game can make us reflect about the nature of things. Since adventurers have to eat to keep up their strength, it is important to always have food in your inventory. Really good food (in the sense of providing faster power regeneration) is player-made, not bought from an NPC provisioner. This rule has a double function: encouraging the player to make use of the crafting possibilities in the game and conveying the moral concept that home-made food is better for you than what you can buy on the street. But cooking is challenging and just as in real life, one has to carefully balance seasoning, heating and stirring in order to produce a high quality meal.
The way the cooking process is translated into metaphors, represented audio-visually to the player via a variety of information modes (visual icons for the buffs, audio feedback when a new buff is activated, two parallel status bars that signify the progress, how much time one has left before the food is cooked to rags and the quality of the food at any given moment etc.) and how meaning is dynamically generated by interpreting the signs on the screen, taking action, reinterpreting the changed state and adapting ones strategy according to the result of this reinterpretation is a terrific example of how complex meaning generation in games can be and what sorts of questions we have to tackle in order to understand it better.
I am just beginning to explore the media specific possibilities of digital games and the way they can be used to produce meaningful and emotionally satisfying experiences. The questions I am most interested in at the moment, as the above examples might have indicated is
• how meaning is dynamically generated across a variety of information and interaction modes,
• how rules and contextual information are integrated in current games and
• how sense-making processes change over a longer period of playing.
To answer these questions I will mainly draw on semantic discourse analysis as well as multimedia semiotic analysis, adapting these methods to the affordances of the interactive subject. My focus will be on comparative analysis of more or less “self-conscious” games as well as an empirical study that investigates the sense-making processes of players.
My goal is to come up with a theoretical model of semiotic game analysis that shall help to identify design strategies to produce more meaningful games. Some of my current hypothesis include that
• games should not be afraid to bare their devices – maximum “realism” might prevent games from becoming truly meaningful at least as long as there is no satisfying AI available;
• interpreting translation processes can provide valuable insights about the nature of things and the human condition, fostering more meaningful games, given that games continue to expand their vocabulary. As Mary Flanagan said at the Nordic Games conference last year, diversity is key to innovation and this is not only true for the designer’s backgrounds but also for the themes games tackle. The art of abstraction has to be exercised!
The Games People Play
Aleks Krotoski (UK)
Responses to GTA Vice City
Dr Aphra Kerr (IRELAND)
I’ve put the slides from my ambient role playing games presentation and the ambient role playing games paper on my website here: http://www.eyles.co.uk/mark/slides.html and here: http://www.eyles.co.uk/mark/papers.html
If anyone who was at the conference has any comments on the ‘Ambient Quest’ conference game then I would be very keen to receive them.
If anyone (either at the conference or not) has any comments on the ambient games suggestions I have made in the paper then I would very much like to hear them. If you don’t want to comment here then please do drop me an email (either to my work email address: mark.eyles port.ac.uk or to my personal email address: mark eyles.co.uk).
Thanks, Mark
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