I should state at the outset that studying cheating, griefing, and similar topics is not a principal part of my research, and there are several esteemed folks around here that do it, so I hope to learn from them if they’d like to weigh in. Here, I’m just following through on some ideas that have been percolating on meaning and games, and how they might help us answer Steven’s question.

To begin this speculation, the first thing I’m going to do is narrow the topic a fair bit. Rather than discuss “griefing” in the broad sense, I’m going to focus on one activity in MMOGs that is often seen as griefing: ganking. Very specifically, I’m talking about a human player, piloting a higher-level/better geared toon, attacking a toon that is much lower level, without any other circumstances (game objectives and narratives), histories (they, or their guilds, know each other or similar), or players (on either side) involved. This is simply the killing (frequently, one-shotting) of another toon by a vastly more powerful toon. I’m drawing my sense of this phenomenon from the open PvP servers of World of Warcraft — other games/server types may vary considerably and interestingly.

What I would like to suggest is that this kind of PvP is meaningless. Or, perhaps more precisely, that the meaning it has is so narrow, rationalized, and improverished that it is outside of, or rejects, the game in which it is situated. Games, as ends in and of themselves, are things that can generate new meanings and experiences. For the ganker, however, ganking is a means to other ends (“Personal best crit!”), not a potentially generative new experience. (And, by the way, please keep in mind that I am not talking about all PvP — there are many other kinds, both institutionally designed by the developer and emergent, which would not fit with the argument I’m making here.)

I’m speculating that ganking happens when a player who does not want to be challenged to play a game (i.e., encounters where the outcome is contingent), instead opts to do something where the outcome is a foregone conclusion: kill a player that is vastly lower in capabilities. If meaning is found at the meeting point of inherited systems of interpretation (cultural expectations) and the performative demands of singular circumstances (something I talked about here), then ganking is a denial of that meaning. It is a retreat from the demands of the new, and it signals a disposition that does not want to be performatively challenged. Ganking lower level players is, then, a somewhat pathetic attempt to feel, well, something. But that something is not the meaning that participating in a challenging game would create — it is removed from that. If there is no contingency, it follows that there is no meaning — all you have left is an impoverished environment where pointless negative reciprocity (I was ganked at L24, so I’ll gank at L60) reigns.

It might be argued against this that an environment of open PvP, rather than erasing contingency, actually spawns it, generating a wide open landscape of ganking possibility for the lower level players. This would be a way to argue that there is still a game, on a broader level, and it is a cat-and-mouse game. The difference in capabilities once the battle is joined is not in question — the cat wins — but the game is actually about avoiding that encounter (thanks to David Simkins for voicing this argument to me). This is an interesting way to go, and I agree that it can turn out this way, under certain game design conditions. I would argue, however (again, I’m being provocative to see where this leads), that in WoW this doesn’t hold, because the architecture of the game is not very flexible about alternative places to go to accomplish objectives. The quests for any given level are in a small set of vastly distributed places, and the transportation costs (in time) for low level characters are high. This means that if someone is trying to get quests done in Stranglethorn Vale, there is not a viable game in avoiding the gankers — they have every advantage also in the “meta” game of cat-and-mouse. For most players, this means that the ganking feels, again, like a foregone conclusion, it is only the question of when it will happen that is utterly contingent (that is, too contingent). In neither aspect is there a performative challenge for the gankee or the ganker. One is left with either too much determination, or too much chaos; either way leads to a loss of meaning.

So why does it happen at all, if it’s so meaningless? To answer this, one would have to make a normative, critical claim (and goodness knows those are popular around here). One would have to say that what happens is that the game objectives get replaced by utterly personal objectives, individualistic and empty goals that are the simulacra of actual (new) meaning. Gankers, this argument would say, are getting their jollies in an endless circle of confirming their own expectations, mistaking the increasing number of notches on their belt for actual personal development. In fact, this line of reasoning would argue, they are each stuck in an iron cage of false objectives.

Now, I can spin this argument out, and understand how to get from point A to point B, and it’s consistent with my experience and preferences. But, on the other hand, I have lots of friends who enjoy open PvP, even the random but inevitable ganking part of it, so I hesitate. I’m also certainly one to be wary of normative claims about other people’s experiences (“Yes, yes — you say you’re having a good time, but you’re really just deluding yourself”).

On the other hand, the argument that if people choose to do something in these domains it is just a different “style of gameplay,” and therefore morally unassailable, also rubs me the wrong way. It seems to rest not only on a separation of play from real experience (and I have a whole set of strong empirical objections to that view), but also on a modernist, individualistic ethic — it’s all about the individual experience, this seems to say, and that should be our final arbiter of all matters ethical.

I don’t have any real answers here, but I’m quite taken with the notion that ganking is, effectively, not a game, and with thinking through the consequences for meaning and experience that follow from this. To what extent this could be extended to other kinds of griefing, I’m not sure, but it does seem to me that quite a few players out there actually don’t seem to want to play a game at all.

I played a lot of pool in college — and I mean a lot. Sophomore and junior year, I would spend between 3-5 hours playing pool on the dorm’s pool table — luckily, a full 9′ one — every night, and lots more during the day on the weekends. I noticed a strange thing that would happen only after my longest and most intense pool playing sessions. Arriving back in my dorm room, I saw it differently. For a little while (the effect would eventually wear off), the first thing I noticed about any room I walked into was the relationship between all the objects (the furniture, people) and the corners of the room. The angles presented themselves to me unbidden, as if any rectangular space were a giant pool-playing surface.

So that’s an example from game-playing, but technology does it too, of course. Being a DVR user for several years now I often find myself doing things like unthinkingly reaching to pause or rewind the radio while in my car. So I thought I would ask the readership to share their experiences with how virtual worlds have, even if only briefly, shaped their dispositions toward other parts of their lives.

A point of clarification: one thing I’m not particularly interested in here are the metaphoric connections that we make between virtual worlds and other domains. These are interesting, of course, but what I’m after here are not the moments where we think that, “Hey, in this contentious meeting Linda’s like the main tank, and Roger’s doing mad dps from range.” Instead, I’m curious to hear about the surprising moments when we realize that we’re seeing/acting toward the world differently, if only for a while.

So, after that intense raid, SL building marathon, grueling 5-man, or solo quest grind, have any of you noticed yourselves approaching the world differently?

In the wake of recent concerns over corruption (Nate provided many of the key links in this post), CCP has announced that they will hold elections among their players for an oversight committee, one empowered to visit CCP’s  offices and “audit” their operations. Scott Jennings chimes in, as do Endie and Mark Wallace.

Like many of you I eagerly await Nate’s take on the recent developments for EvE, but what does this mean for virtual worlds more generally? The broader issues generated by the power that virtual world makers wield over the the deep architecture of increasingly high-stakes economies are not going away. The analogy to gaming (gambling) commissions is apt, not because these virtual worlds are, effectively, virtual casinos (well, some of them might be), but because of the underlying principle that informs that policy-making; i.e., when a group of people puts real capital on the line in a broadly contrived environment there is a compelling public interest in ensuring that the conditions conform to some notion of fairness.

CCP’s solution is intriguing, striking even, because it breaks from a largely unspoken assumption that the relationship between players and developers should be distant — or, at least, heavily managed and regulated (by the developer). We’ll have to see how this solution unfolds in practice, of course, but for the moment at least it suggests a new ethic surrounding these environments with regard to accountability and political legitimacy. CCP may have opened its doors in the name of transparency, but is letting those who are not gods (in Richard’s formulation) check the gods’ work the direction in which virtual worlds must move?

When it came to generalizability, Maxwell (yes, that Maxwell) was ready to wield a not-so-subtle hammer against those he saw as seeking to hitch science to a positivist view of the world. He said (in a speech the text of which is available here):

It is a metaphysical doctrine that from the same antecedents follow the same consequents…[I]t is not of much use in a world like this, in which the same antecedents never again concur, and nothing ever happens twice.

By highlighting the irreducibly contingent nature of the world, Maxwell joined Charles Darwin in a view of scientific inquiry that saw its provisionality as perfectly consistent with a world that was not, in the last analysis, law-driven and ordered. Instead, they argued that the proper aim of science was to explore the processes that are in place under different conditions, with an awareness that those conditions never perfectly reproduce themselves (for Maxwell, this anti-positivism was also tied to his religious views).[fn 3]

In a sense, all academic research is based on critical observation of such situated events and circumstances. It may be concerned, yes, with making provisional comparisons across them when possible, but it is just as often concerned with understanding the specific processes in place that led to unique outcomes not generalizable elsewhere. For this reason attempts to trumpet generalizability as the primary (or exclusive) aim of the social sciences (where I see it happening quite often) not only marginalize particularist work by historians, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, and others, but (ironically, to me) thereby also seek to exclude a vast swath of the natural sciences (such as much work in paleontology, geology, and biology, to name a few).

As work in the sociology of science has shown, expert critical evaluation (usually associated with the humanities), observation, and hypothesis-testing are all used by all branches of the natural sciences. Efforts to claim special status for the natural sciences (or any field) by pointing to hypothesis-testing ignore not only this, but also the fact that, as Maxwell suggests, hypothesis-testing in the absolute sense does not, in fact, exist (what you have instead are very very very very close approximations of it, and this is only possible for certain kinds of conditions).

What this means for research on virtual worlds is that we must be wary of how the drive to fight for resources may prompt researchers to claim that a certain kind of project (generalization, particularization), or a certain kind of methodology is “scientific” (or, one might imagine, “humanistic,” although the comparative lack of money makes this more of a localized danger!), while others are not. A broad view of science, in all its variety, and, ultimately, of academic inquiry, should inoculate us from this kind of divisive maneuvering. Critical observation, exploratory research, and hypothesis-driven work are all going to be vital components of understanding what virtual worlds are all about.

[fn 1] Alert TN reader “Rex” (aka Alex Golub) pointed out this issue in the comments on that post, and I have long wanted to give that observation a proper response.

[fn 2] I am also moved to write this because there is something of an ongoing conversation about scientific “truth” and methodologies here on TN (one example).

[fn 3] For further critical discussions of the limitations of generalizability see the Preface of Anthony Giddens’ The Constitution of Society, and Chapter 8 of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue.

What people find fascinating about activities labeled “games” is precisely how they make the contingency of our day-to-day experience available to us, but within semi-bounded (never fully separable) spaces. It is because of this that they are able to take on the same stakes and range of meanings that we find in everyday experience. If we are ever going to be able to ferret out what is powerful and important about games, we must work from an approach that: (1) sees them as never fully separable from other aspects of experience, (2) recognizes what is at stake in them (they are never entirely “consequence-free”), and (3)  avoids normative, culturally-located assumptions (about “pleasure” or “fun”). In short, this approach must see games as processual — like everyday life, they are open-ended sites for social practice. Once we have such an approach in place, we will be free to do the more interesting (and challenging) work of exploring their stakes, relative separabilty, and affective or normative associations through empirically-grounded research, no longer assuming what we should be explaining.

I have posted a paper to ssrn, “Stopping Play: A New Approach to Games” (here), that presents such an approach to games  (and briefly outlines the sources and limitations of the play assumption along the way). Any comments welcome.

 Abstract:

Games have intruded into popular awareness to an unprecedented level, and scholars, policy makers, and the media alike are beginning to consider how games might offer insight into fundamental questions about human society. But in the midst of this opportunity for their ideas to be heard, it is game scholars who are selling games short. In their rush to highlight games’ importance, they have tended toward an unsustainable exceptionalism, seeing games as fundamentally set apart from everyday life. This view casts gaming as a subset of play, and therefore – like play – as an activity that is inherently separable, safe, and pleasurable. Before we can confront why games are important, and make use of them to pursue the aims of policy and knowledge, we must rescue games from this framework and develop an understanding of them unburdened by the category of play, one that will both accord with the experience of games by players themselves, and bear the weight of the new questions being asked about them and about society. To that end, I offer here an understanding of games that eschews exceptionalist, normatively-loaded approaches in favor of one that stresses them as a characterized by process. In short, I argue for seeing games as domains of contrived contingency, capable of generating emergent practices and interpretations. This approach enables us to understand how games are, rather than set apart from everyday life, instead intimately connected with it. With this approach in place, I conclude by discussing two key recent developments in games, persistence and complex, implicit contingency, that together may account for why some online games are now beginning to approach the texture of everyday life.

[Edit: One more piece, to fill out the picture I am offering here…]

Here is the short version of the definition of games I offer in the paper, plus a brief elucidation:

“A game is a semi-bounded domain of contrived contingency that generates interpretable outcomes.” (p. 9)

All games, I argue, include the incorporation of one or more sources of contingency (the paper identifies four: stochastic, social, performative, and semiotic), carefully calibrated (by design or cultural practices) to create a compelling experience. This is the first aspect of games. The second aspect of games is their capacity to generate meaning. The outcomes that games generate (never perfectly predictable) are subject to interpretations by which more or less stable culturally-shared meanings are generated; the key point about this generation of meaning is that it also is open-ended, potentially transformed by the unfolding of the game itself.