Emulating reality

When we think of emulation, we usually think of the emulation of software that exists only as a digital artifact. But something recently brought to my attention challenges this predominant narrative of software and emulation. In the world of digital preservation, it’s a fairly obvious point that the digital is not any less real, any less material, and this example only highlights that.

So, the topic in question: I found an old blog post (from 2009) celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the moon landing. This post describes a project to emulate some of the original code from the command module and lunar module. It’s mostly really just something cool on the web, but more than that, there’s a reason why I’m writing a(n admittedly short) blog post about this: this is a clear case of emulation applied to something that was undeniably “real-world.” What could it even mean to emulate the code from the lunar module? What draws someone to do that? I guess you have to be fascinated with the Apollo Program, and also really into old code. Or something. But how can you emulate this code and forget that three people were inside the module that this code represents? How can you emulate this code and forget that two people used this code to set foot on the moon?

It’s a reminder that even when we are talking about emulation of games (link to a thought-provoking and vaguely relevant blog post), we’re talking about a constellation of things that real people played in real space. And sure, maybe emulation isn’t responsible for representing that aspect of the experience, but we are.

On metadata; or, data about data about data about…

Today, I was looking through a bunch of things including the excellent Signal blog run by the Library of Congress (I like to read this blog every so often, though they post daily). One post on email file formats (obviously, in the context of preservation) had a link to a site which hosted this presentation by Carl Fleischhauer from 2006 about audio-visual data and different approaches in commercial and cultural-heritage institutions. I think there’s a lot to take away from this admittedly bare-bones and dated presentation, but the major point is the recognition of overlaps in the mandates of those institutions. And how this overlap gets materialized in metadata.

As a side note, I think one way I think about research and things that I am studying is by recognizing institutional mandates and institutional authority, and then moving on to identify the ways that individual people negotiate their relationships to these institutions. Not sure exactly where that places me, but pretty squarely within contemporary media/cultural studies. (Which is why it’s funny that I’m in an iSchool now, but we’ll leave that laugh for another day.) I also surprise myself by being interested in people, because for a long time I wasn’t. It was all traces and objects and materials and practices. Also understanding everything as technologies. (I lied, maybe that’s a new thing.)

So, I’m reading this presentation and it comes to a discussion of metadata and how metadata needs are (obviously) different for different institutions/user groups. In this case, the two groups referred to are public television and commercial broadcasting (p. 46 in that pdf document), but I was reminded of another set of user groups that I read about recently (I suppose this is why I’m trying to blog more, because my memory is utter shit and I can’t depend on it). I think the point in that one was talking about how, no shit, we can’t use a metadata system made for a commercial system for archival quality metadata.

Metadata schemas are technologies, made for different use cases, and understandably can never be complete. But I think it’s illuminating to see what different institutions use different descriptors and tags and such, because the fact that, say, WordPress distinguishes between Posts and Pages and that Twitter now stores “post replied to” and “user replied to” are all important in understanding these systems in contemporary use. And honestly, all of these are metadata, even though the kind of metadata I’m talking about are the kinds required to contextualize an object in a socio-historical context (Dublin Core, MARC, etc.).

On a related note: check out the Historical Software collection at the Internet Archive, they’ve got tons of stuff available for in-browser emulated play.

On friendship and technology; or, FRIEND COMPUTER!

I’ve been reading Nunberg’s edited volume, The Future of the Book, for class, and so have been wading through a fair bit of anti-techno-utopian rhetoric. Normally, that’s cool, because I’m no techno-utopian. But the way in which I am not techno-utopian is that I recognize the continuities and remediations (thanks, Bolter and Grusin) in new media forms. So I don’t like the rhetoric that relies on assuming that new media fundamentally alter the ways that we connect to one another.

So, that said. I appreciate when people put effort into exploring how people will be people through a variety of media forms. And recently, Maureen O’Connor, writing for NYMag’s The Cut blog, penned a great post about friendship in the digital age and group texting and dress rehearsing nudes.

I have to admit, I think The Cut does a consistently thorough and thoughtful treatment of elements of modern culture from the perspective of style and fashion. But this post in particular came at a good time for my mental universe, just as I was grappling with a rhetoric of rupture and social revolution. It’s about how a group of childhood (maybe young adulthood is better?) friends came together through texting. It’s about how two friends share their insecurities by texting pictures to one another. And it’s nothing utopian or too idealistic, but it shows how people manage to keep a sense of social interaction because that’s the point of all this.

My personal experiences certainly bear this argument out. I keep up with my best friend from college through a daily barrage (I mean this in the best way possible) of texts and gchats. Hell, I started my tumblr because I wanted to continue the casual ritual we had of sharing our outfits before going about our respective days (we had basically a suite situation with two separate rooms and a connecting bathroom). I know other people look at it now, occasionally, and I doubt she does so regularly, but she is still my audience for those posts. (Hi!)

I’ve had a blog of some sort or another since 2003. For me, writing on blogs is always a quasi-meditative task, with a nameless, faceless audience. I take pleasure in this distance, sometimes. I know that part of my process is just writing things out, and if people happen to comment and leave their thoughts on my writings, then I can incorporate those and be an even better writer. But this is different from friendship. Friendship requires a sense of reciprocity, or at least of mutual recognition. (Feel free to substitute any kind of positive human relationship for “friendship” there.) The faceless nonexistent audience that I imagine when writing a blog post, the echo chamber of my own metaphorical shower stall, that is emphatically not the kind of engagement that O’Connor is describing. And that’s kind of a great thing. All kinds of engagement are possible, we just have to make it so. Not our technologies, ourselves.

In closing, O’Connor offers an insightful (and hilarious) meditation on the freedoms of a child-like perspective:

Some may find the constant chatter and creep toward co-dependence childish — but the art of friendship has always been one that children perform more naturally than adults. (Other things children do better than adults: imagination, texting, wonderment, recovering from the shame of shitting in your pants.)

Maybe allowing ourselves to explore—new technologies, new forms, new social networks—brings us closer to that wonderment that makes magic happen.

Also, the “Friend computer” is a reference to Paranoia, a hilariously enjoyable role-playing game.

Connecting through porn, or just creeping?

Preface: since this is about porn games, any links should be assumed to be NSFW. The games linked also include a huge variety of fetishes, so. If there’s anything you know you don’t like, it’s honestly probably best to avoid the games. Besides like, hardcore gore, it’s mostly “anything goes.”

So I’m sitting here at my computer, and I get up to brush my teeth and as I’m getting up I pass my boyfriend at his computer. I ask what he’s up to, and he responds, “it’s in alpha,” and points to his screen where I can see a rudimentary interface and porny text.

It’s a text-based porn game, like Corruption of Champions (at the time of writing this post I don’t know the title of this particular one, or have a link to it; a day later, here’s a link to LEWD. As the boyfriend said, it’s in alpha, and moreover, I haven’t tried it. No guarantees. I have no idea about the content although I’ll assume there’s some transformation fetish going on).

As I was brushing my teeth, I got to thinking about how porn games work to realize this fantasy of sexual prowess and how it’s all about making your fantasy happen within the confines of the game world. I’ll be honest here, I think porn games have figured out a long time before mainstream games that your embodiment in an avatar is crucial to the experience (especially to the experience of virtual sexual pleasure) and that giving players the ability to customize *everything under the sun* is a huge part of this embodiment. But I digress.

So there’s this fantasy of being the one that is attractive to everyone in this world who you are attracted to. It’s been written about with respect to Dragon Age; that everyone in the game is Warden- or Hawke-sexual more than they are any other sexuality, and that real people’s sexual appetites are more subtle than that. But this is the guiding principle behind porn games. (It’s actually more nuanced than that because many of them, especially the text-based ones I’m thinking of, will have character preferences encoded into the NPCs. But I digress again.)

I was thinking, and this is where it gets weird: this is the same fantasy that real-life prostitution materializes. The idea that this person is here, completely sexually interested in you, and only you…for as long as you have scheduled together. And real-life prostitution has time limits and more importantly, you can’t barge in on a session if someone else is in the middle of their own private fantasy.

What if we take this and apply it to a multiplayer online porn game? The multiplayer aspect being completely invisible, except when you try to do a scene that someone else is in the middle of doing. Say you decide you want to try to fuck the bartender with the robotic horse dick (yeah that’s a real example), and you’re turned away because, hold up, he’s fucking someone else right now. I don’t think I’d go so far as to have the players contact one another in the game or see one another or anything, but just being aware of the presence of other real people engaging in their own sexual fantasies in the same imaginative landscape that you’re using for your own. I wonder what that would do to people.

ETA: There are a couple links I can’t not add…

• First, the BYU anti-masturbation movie
• Second, the Lifetime movie about the kid who was addicted to porn and also energy drinks (= masturbation)

Also I should also state explicitly here: I am not against sexuality. I really hope that didn’t actually need to be said.

My thesis is online!

Just to show that there’s some reward to hard work, I now have my thesis online (hosted by my department). Whee. It’s a little terrifying, honestly, to have it up, but it’s the good kind of terrifying.

You can download or read it here, but I’ll include the abstract in this post in case you just want to congratulate me and move on. 😀

This paper explores the relation between criticism and establishment of narrative forms and genres, focusing on the cultural situation of video games. Comparing the context of early film criticism and contemporary video game criticism, I argue that the public negotiation of meaning and value codifies a new medium as it emerges. In the case of digital games in particular, contemporary critics approach the question of “what is a game” rhetorically, rarely addressing it outright but allowing metatextual considerations to influence their readings. I trace the sites of criticism, moving from newspapers and weekly periodicals in the case of film, to blogs and web publications in the case of digital games, and explore how the shifting reception of each form took hold in the different media available. I focus especially on the state of public video game criticism today, locating the persuasive strengths in the ability for quick communication between writers, as well as the easy dissemination of digital games. I ground my analysis in the game criticism produced in response to Dear Esther (2011) and League of Legends (2009) that visibly struggled with ideas of narrative, game, and interactivity.

❤

And I promise I’ll write those other posts, someday…

How do we talk about communication in multiplayer games?

I’m posting this now because it’s been percolating for weeks so I might as well.

In other news, I’m getting tired of these titles, but I like the consistency…sigh. Problems in academiaaaaa.

Let’s talk talking. How do multiplayer games implement easy, fast communication? Communication is one of those things that we take for granted in off-line (analogue?) play because it comprises so much of the play experience that it is invisible. For example, a tabletop role-playing game only exists when players communicate to the GM what actions they are taking. Similarly, a game of chess-by-mail only exists because two people write to each other and state the move they wish to make. Communication is, quite simply, the name of the game.

In both of these examples, players communicate intent within rule systems. It’s not as easy as I made it sound up there; communication isn’t the only thing reifying these game instances. The established structures of rules and notation and yes, communication styles, empower players to act in meaningful ways.

It’s never as easy as “give them voice chat and they will come”. Opening up such a system to the public invariable invites abuse and trolling, and does not always work well with the existing game. Players in a group of friends often use outside services such as Skype, Mumble, Teamspeak, or Ventrilo. On the other hand, these things are not friendly to strangers trying to create a cohesive group from within the game itself.

Multiplayer games, especially ones with large and diverse player bases, have taken different approaches to easing communication inside game spaces. There are a few that I’m familiar with through play, and a few that I’ve been pointed towards through exploring this. I do not present these with any extended commentary, but just to show the range of options and the questions raised by each one.

Team Fortress 2 supports voice chat in game through a simple press of the “v” key, though this feature may be abused; players have the ability to mute other players for their own sake. More interestingly, Voice Commands are built in to the default key bindings of the game. These voice commands are often context- and character-sensitive. There are three menus of voice commands, accessible from the “z”, “x”, and “c” keys. Each of the menus has a set of 8 commands further triggered from the 1-8 number keys, with 0 reserved as a cancel. The commands are pieces of information that the designers felt required easy and fast communication between players; they are pieces of information that make the experience of play qualitatively better.

Looking at the voice commands in Team Fortress 2, we see certain categories repeat. Most important are the calls to the medic for help:

Due to its importance and universal nature, the “Medic” call by default has its own separate keybind (default E).

– “Voice Commands”, Team Fortress Wikia

But beyond that, there are a set of commands for informing team movements (z3-z6), commands for revealing information about enemy team movements (x1-x2), requests for aid from the support classes (x3-x7, and the aforementioned “Medic” call), as well as general communication such as “Thanks”, “Yes/No”, and all of the calls under the c menu. With this set of 24 voice commands, players should theoretically be able to communicate their intent in a restricted domain (the game space). Anything left over is then relegated to voice chat or text chat.

With this kind of system where critical pieces of information are bound to particular keys, conveying that information is easy and leaves no room for trolling (except creatively, such as by spamming “Put dispenser here” as a heavy, which leads to a chorus of “pootis pootis pootis”).

In Left 4 Dead/L4D2,as in Team Fortress 2 Valve have taken cooperation as the goal of gameplay. The GDC slides that I’ve linked before (“Replayable Cooperative Game Design: Left 4 Dead”, Michael Booth, GDC 2009) take one slide to focus on “vocalizations” (“Requiring Cooperation: Vocalizations”, slide 25 of 71). As described in this slide, these vocalizations are automatically generated by the player characters and NPC human allies based on contextual clues. They have three main purposes that enhance cooperative gameplay: “Improv[e] situational awareness”, “Communicat[e] short term goals”, and “Encourag[e] cooperation via a baseline of camaraderie” (slide 25).

With Team Fortress 2, we’ve seen what happens when you take communication of situational awareness and short term goals, and map it to keys rather than leaving it to players to type up long statements in chat, or to press a button and then voice chat to the subset of the server that is currently on a third-party service. It makes for easier teamwork, and often a friendlier set of interactions. (I wonder. This is based on personal experience.) It also models the appropriate forms of communication for the system, as these are the twenty-four commands that the designers have chosen as vital to the experience of play.

With Left 4 Dead (and L4D2), we can see what happens when, instead of mapping those to key-presses, you remove those from the conscious decision-making process of the player. The human allies will always produce vocalizations, regardless of whether they’re played by a human player or controlled by AI systems.

We also needed a way for the AI characters to shout out important facts in the world. If I’m playing with my friends, and one of them sees an ammo cache in a dark corner, then my friend can just tell me. That’s an important thing to know; the ammo is in different places every time. … Once we did it for the bots, we realized it was pretty cool for the human-controlled characters to do it also; it’s a bit of additoinal roleplaying, and more convenient than having to call out yourself.
– “Rule Databases for Contextual Dialog and Game Logic“

…To be continued…

How do we talk about character in eSports, Part 2

Continuing after a sick couple days…

So one of the difficulties of discussing character in League of Legends lies in the narrative complexity at work in the game. It’s a narrative complexity that is almost invisible to the players, but Riot has clearly taken great pains to establish the consistency of every part of gameplay. In the first part of this post, I was talking about the summoner/champion distinction that allows for 111 different playable characters yet a persistent identity. Now I’d like to talk about multiplayer interactions and how they are supported (or not) by the lore.

League of Legends is a game with no built-in singleplayer. You can create a bot game and be the only human player, but that sort of play takes the main gameplay mode, multiplayer, and substitutes bots for human players. Part of the point of League of Legends is that it’s a game that happens when people get together and play it. This also makes it incredibly hard to pin down and write about (if you should want to), because you probably want to write about the metagame and about particular games, and it’s hard to do that when the thing is slippery.

But this is something that game critics should be used to, no? This is the bread-and-butter of NGJ, the whole point of describing a subjective experience of play.

Anyway. Moving on past that minor quibble (hah, minor), let’s talk about team composition. For many players, the champion they select must help the team. At a basic level, there are certain prescribed roles that each team ought to have. To what extent the players fulfill these roles is up to them, but the cultural expectations do exist. In terms of the basic game mode, the 5v5 “Classic” game type played on “Summoner’s Rift”, there are 5 positions: top-lane, jungle, mid-lane, and carry and support teaming up in the bottom-lane. There are expectations for the kinds of champions you play in each of the lanes or the jungle, and this set of positions creates a well-balanced team that is hard to shut down based on champion selection alone. If, on the other hand, your entire team were to go support, or any other type, it might cause unbalanced gameplay from the outset. The point is to pick a team that will do well, but also one that you will enjoy playing.

when picking a champion to play out of my diverse champion pool, this is how i decide: 1. Where am I playing? (ie, what position am i playing, out of the standard, top, jungle, mid, ad carry, or support) 2. Who am I up against? (in draft pick, if the person I will be laning against has picked their champion, that gives me an opportunity to pick a champion who will have an easy time laning against them, mechanically, or pick someone who will counter their playstyle late game.) 3. What does my team need? (depending on what everyone else picked, do we have enough crowd control and peel? Do we have enough tanky people or do I need to pick someone who works with a tanky build?) 4. What do I feel like? (this is the intangible ‘fun’ quality. I feel like all of the champions can be fun in the right situation even if some of them are more fun than others. But what sounds fun right now?)

– LordCOTA

Now, there could be a lot to say about the construction of these roles. I’m thinking about other 5v5 competitions, most particularly the team kendo tournament, or futsal. But the thing that I want to emphasize is that League of Legends is a team game, first and foremost. Sure, it doesn’t always get played like that, especially in solo queue or duo queue, and in non-tournament/non-competitive play. But the game is structured to work well and to be fun if you play as a team.

And here, I’m going to drop a reference to a publication by Valve that addresses how to design for cooperative play, because it’s good and you should all read it:

• Michael Booth. March 2009. “Replayable Cooperative Game Design: Left 4 Dead.” Game Developers Conference. Slides

I think next time I’ll talk about how teams/community/individualism come up in the few times League of Legends gets discussed in mainstream games crit.

How do we talk about character in eSports, Part 1

To continue from where I left off in the first post in this series, I am going to look at how people within what I consider “mainstream games criticism” (aka, the major blogs and sites) talk about League of Legends. I mentioned the two camps of posts referenced in Critical Distance: two about the player community, and one about the character. Similarly, out of eight posts on Borderhouse Blog tagged “League of Legends”, six reference character design and two discuss the player community.

In this post, I’d like to talk about character:

Defining “character” in League of Legends can be surprisingly tricky. On one hand, champions are probably the most commonly identified “characters” in the game, with names, appearances, and particular playstyles. The champions are the face(s) of the game and they are the player’s interaction with the game world.  Like in Diablo or Warcraft, you control the character’s movement and action to an extent, with paths and autoattacks handled by the game itself.

On the other hand, champions do not persist as player avatars past the duration of a single match. This strange feature is also supported by the lore. One of Riot’s guides to gameplay identifies the summoner as the player’s persistent character, a force of political balance who fights by summoning champions.

A player in League of Legends takes on the role of a Summoner – a gifted spell caster who has the power to bring forth a champion to fight as their avatar in Valoran’s Fields of Justice. With all major political decisions on Valoran now decided by the outcome of the contests that take place in the battle arenas, a Summoner is the key force of change on the continent.

– “Summoner Information“, League of Legends Learning Center, July 6 2010

This convoluted relationship of summoner to champion allows Riot to sidestep the issues raised by quasi-persistent champions: the champion serves as the in-match “avatar” of the summoner, in the same way that the summoner serves as the invisible in-game avatar of the player. There are a few characteristics of summoners and champions that complicate the idea of character in League of Legends.

Summoners, for example, can heal their champion, damage opposing minions directly, teleport their champion anywhere in the Field of Justice they are in, fortify their team’s turret defenses, and a slew of other game-impacting results.

– “Summoner Information“, League of Legends Learning Center, July 6 2010

So we can see that summoners and champions both impact the game during a match, and summoners, though they do not have a manifestation on the field, have a direct connection with the game world.

I’m going to try to replicate a quick table here that captures the messiness of these two categories:

How character is spread over Summoner and Champion (Google Doc version here)

I need to flesh out the terminology, but I hope you get the idea.

Rebuttal: How Players Talk About eSports

This is a guest post by LordCOTA (my non-resident expert on LoL) in response to some claims I made in How do players talk about eSports? about “game” and “metagame” as it relates to (e)sports. I think the issue starts somewhere around when I said “So here we have sports, where the “metagame” (LoL version) is practically what we think of when we think of the game.”

Without further ado, the rebuttal:

Children begin playing in soccer leagues as early as 4 years old. If you’ve ever been to a game of soccer at this level, you probably understand why it’s been referred to as herdball or magnetball. But the fact remains these kids are playing soccer. Fast forward to 7-10ish and the kids are actually playing their positions which means the forwards are doing everything and the defenders are basically standing still until the ball is in scoring position. That contrasts pretty heavily with how technical and advanced professional soccer is, but it is all soccer.

A very similar learning curve exists in League of Legends. After the tutorial you know that enemy champions are bad and killing them and their turrets gives you gold. Those are the rules, the “game”. But you don’t know much else and people just do whatever. You notice that there are two people in the top lane and two in the bottom and one in the middle, so you split your team up that way. Eventually you learn it’s best to put certain types of champions into certain lanes and to have balanced team compositions with some key roles being filled. Fast forward a few levels and people begin sending one person top and having someone in the jungle, and a lot of entirely new dynamics of play emerge. At some point the game because a very close emulation of the professional scene, but can you at any point deny we are playing League of Legends?

League of Legends, as a new sport on a medium that is very new to sports, requires that dual terminology to differentiate the experience you get being dropped into the game with just the rules, versus the game that is being played competitively.

LordCOTA is an avid player of League of Legends and can be found on twitter @lordcota, in LoL as LordCOTA, or emailed at: cota (at) abzde (dot) com.

How do players talk about eSports?

In exploring the world of League of Legends, I find myself stymied by some of the basic terminology. The application of “game” and “metagame” is counterintuitive for me, and it took a fairly lengthy discussion with my boyfriend (LordCOTA) who has been playing League of Legends (for three “seasons”; more later) to understand how they’re used in this context. So I’d like to replicate both some of what I learned, and some of how I feel about it. I am trying very hard to avoid some of my prescriptivist impulses, and instead, want very much to focus on how these terms are constructed by players and developers and random forum posters. Because despite not showing up in mainstream (as much as there can be a mainstream) games criticism, this vernacular theory is very important to me. (And I hope I can give it its due.)

I’m going to quote a comment on the first post in this quasi-series, to illustrate this point:

But lastly (and maybe most importantly) I think that the kind of engagement with map layouts, skills, balance, and even lore is often sequestered away in sites that are about becoming really really *good* at the game, and so there’s a feeling of just creating the same knowledge as is already out there.

– Ben Abraham, comment here

With that flourishing player discourse in mind, let’s look at “metagame” and “game”, and how these two terms work together to make League of Legends what it is, halfway between classic video and computer games, and sports. In this way, League of Legends offers an example of how eSports are constructed by viewers and gamers alike.

Game refers to the mechanics of the game within the client, what you’re allowed to do by the game rules itself, the original product of the designers. The game includes stats, and is balanced based on the state of competitive play (both professional and high league). Riot Games tunes League of Legends biweekly during the “season” when competitive play is happening, and makes bigger adjustments between “seasons”.

The metagame is set of rules and expectations for how the game should be played, built on top of the restrictions of the game mechanics.

“that’s what the community considers the appropriate way to play, and it follows the current state of the competitive scene of the game”

– LordCOTA

It is similar to emergent play in a way, except if emergent play describes the moment of surprise and unpredictability, metagame refers to when that previously-surprising action becomes standard.

High-level players try out certain modes of play, which eventually settle into what gets known as the “metagame”, which affects what Riot rolls out in their biweekly balance patches. As a newcomer to League of Legends, I get somewhat confused by how people use “metagame” (and “meta”) to refer to things that I would consider part of the game, but in discussing it with my interviewee (lol) I think I have a better handle on why those terms are used in that way, and it’s actually fucking fascinating to me.

So here we have sports, where the “metagame” (LoL version) is practically what we think of when we think of the game. Soccer isn’t a game about kicking a ball, it’s about movement and getting your defense to push up just enough to apply pressure but not enough to leave a hole, and of having a goalie, and people designated to go score goals and people designated to stop goals from happening. Football has a whole system of plays and roles; there’s a person on every football team whose entire purpose in the game is to be good at kicking. Nothing else, just kicking the ball between the goalposts. And, what happens in sports is that over time these cultural expectations of how the game ought to be played start to shift, because really good people start doing really strange things, and the best part is, they work.

And apparently, that same thing happens in League of Legends, except this is called the “metagame”.

Next time: Stay tuned for a rebuttal of my points about game/metagame!