Gaming Networks, issue <span name="st">8</span> of The Fibreculture Journal
<div>Edited by Chris Chesher, Alice Crawford and
Julian Kücklich</div>
<div><br></div>
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Articles:<br>
<br>
Gillian "Gus" Andrews - '<font size="2">Land of a Couple of Dances:
Global and Local Influences on Freestyle Play in <em>Dance Dance Revolution'</em></font><br>
Dean Chan - '<font size="2">Negotiating Intra-Asian
Games Networks: On Cultural Proximity, East Asian Games Design,
and Chinese Farmers'<br>
</font>Laurie N. Taylor - '<font size="2">Cameras, Radios, and Butterflies: the Influence and Importance of Fan Networks for Game Studies'<br>
</font>David B. Nieborg - '<font size="2">Mods, Nay! Tournaments,
Yay! - The Appropriation of Contemporary Game Culture by the U.S.
Military'<br>
Larissa Hjorth - '</font><font size="2">Playing at being mobile: Gaming and cute culture in South Korea'<br>
</font>Bo Kampmann Walther - '<font size="2">Pervasive Gaming: Formats, Rules and Space'<br>
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</font>
<p>It is increasingly difficult to think of cultural formations as
distinct entities because of our awareness of the increased <em>interconnectedness</em>
of our communication systems," writes Tiziana Terranova in
her 2004 book <em>Network Cultures</em>, and nowhere is this felt
more acutely than in the domain of computer games. Phenomena such
as <em>Pokémon</em>, which sweep the entire planet, employ
a multitude of media channels to plant their memes in the brains
of millions, and erect merchandising empires of unprecedented magnitude,
are only the most visible symptoms of this development. Massively
multi-player online games like <em>EverQuest</em> and <em>World
of Warcraft</em> bind players together in social networks that span
the globe, and extend well beyond the realm of the virtual. In part,
this is because gaming has become an increasingly online phenomenon,
and technological developments bear witness to this fact: for the
new generation of game consoles, including Xbox 360, Wii, and PlayStation
3, network adapters are no longer an optional accessory, but part
of their core functionality; portable devices such as the PSP and
the Nintendo DS facilitate the set-up of ad-hoc networks through
wi-fi, while distribution of PC games is shifting from "brick
and mortar" retail to content delivery over networks such
as Steam.</p>
<p>The result of this increased interconnectedness is a blurring of
boundaries - between real and virtual, private and public, global
and local. In the last year or so, we have seen a number of publications
on the subject of games which address the difficult questions arising
from this blurring of boundaries, and embrace the network paradigm,
thus opening up new avenues of inquiry for future research. Books
like Edward Castronova's <em>Synthetic Worlds</em> (2005) and TL
Taylor's <em>Play between Worlds</em> (2006) are spearheading the
second wave of game studies, characterised by an awareness of the
social, cultural and political contexts within which gaming is taking
place. Game Studies 2.0, as one of us has recently called it, has
much more in common with Terranova's research on network cultures
than with, say, Janet Murray's <em>Hamlet on the Holodeck</em> or
Espen Aarseth's <em>Cybertext</em>. As important as these books
were for the birth of game studies as an academic discipline, their
usefulness in the contemporary world of networked gaming is limited.
While the likes of <em>Halo</em>, <em>Grand Theft Auto </em>and
<em>Metal Gear Solid</em> will continue to deliver engrossing experiences
for individual players, we no longer associate gaming primarily
with single-player games.</p>
<p>In
order to account for these developments, game studies must try to
answer the question of how games create links between people,
institutions, and cultures. It is undeniable that games create networks
between players from different cultures, but this does not mean that
the cultural differences between them are suspended. More often than
not, these differences are highlighted, and may even become a source of
conflict, due to the fact that games that are created for a global
audience are not only localised for different markets, but are also
appropriated by players in different ways. Take the example of <em>Starcraft</em>,
an American real-time strategy game published by Blizzard in 1998,
which subsequently became one of the best-selling games in South
Korea. In the context of South Korea, <em>Starcraft</em> quickly
acquired the status of a professional sport, complete with celebrity
players, sponsorship deals, and games being broadcast on national
television. Of course, this raised the stakes considerably, and it can
be argued that the changes implemented in later updates of the game,
such as stronger cheat prevention, and the option to 'record' games,
are due to its lasting popularity in South Korea. As this and many
other examples indicate, there is an ongoing, complex interaction
between the local and the global. Finding ways of describing and
analysing these networks of interaction is one of the challenges game
studies faces.</p>
<p>Another, directly related challenge,
is to develop ways of accounting for the variety of fashions in which
games become embedded in everyday life. If we subscribe to the view
that culture is not something that is simply passed on from one
generation to the next, but something that is kept alive through
practice, and we recognise that play is a cultural practice, then it is
obvious that games cannot be described in purely formal terms. In the
example given above, the game remains the same, but the manner in which
it is played varies across cultures. It is important to note that play
differs not only inter-culturally but also intra-culturally, as players
find different uses for games in their lives. Cultural imagery and
values may be understood differently in a different context, and the
same is true for ideological messages. While games often come burdened
with ideology, this does not mean players cannot find ways of resisting
interpellation. There is a long tradition of playful subversion, from
the <em>Quake</em> players who wrapped female 'skins' around male avatars and early game modifications like <em>Castle Smurfenstein </em>to the sophisticated 'countergaming' culture of today, which includes mods that act as a form of political critique (
e.g., <em>Escape from Woomera</em>), games that engage directly with social issues (such as those created by Molleindustria), and satirical machinima like <em>The Strangerhood</em>.
But this does not mean that simply playing a game off-the-shelf does
have to be affirmative of the status quo. Modders, machinima makers and
creators of 'serious games' started out as simple players too, but that
apparently hasn't stopped them from engaging with games in a critical
fashion.</p>
<p>The multiple, active ways in which gamers perform both as consumers and, in many ways, <em>producers</em>
of the games they play, draws attention to the question of technicity,
whose significance for game studies has recently been highlighted by
Helen Kennedy and Jon Dovey in their book <em>Game Cultures</em>. As
they argue, technicity must not only be understood as a set of
technological skills, but as a way of engaging with technology that
impacts upon both the way we see ourselves and others. While it is
significant that games are often one of the first access points to new
technology for children, and that the skills required to play a game
are remarkably similar to the skills required for most kinds of
informational labour, it is also worth highlighting that games allow
for an affective relationship with technology. In other words: games
are where we learn to love machines. Games are also the sites where
many of the first experiments in a post-human lifestyle are taking
place: where fortunes are made selling virtual real estate, where
people fall in love with other people's avatars, where new algorithmic
art forms are invented. Importantly, this also allows us to see how old
these new lifestyles are, how virtual we have always been. Technology,
understood as a combination of <em>techne</em> and <em>logos</em>, has always been at the heart of the social networks humans create. </p>
<p>Taken
together, these four vectors - the increasing interconnectedness of
games, games as a site of interaction between the global and the local,
play as a cultural practice, and games as an apparatus of a
technological subjectivity - point to a problematic whose surface has
hardly been scratched so far: the politics of play. Recognising that
play takes place within specific social, cultural, and economic
contexts allows us to understand that it is interwoven with diverse
political discourses, ranging from ideology to identity, from
intellectual property rights to labour rights. First inroads into this
territory have been made, most notably by Nick Dyer-Witheford, Ian
Bogost, and Alexander Galloway, but much more work remains to be done.
Ensuring the success of this work will require us to think about games
in a new way, unencumbered by established theoretical paradigms, and it
will also require us to come up with new methods of studying games. If
we want to account for the myriad ways in which games are interwoven
with everyday life, we will need to look at games much more closely
than we have been doing. At the same time, we will need to learn to
take a step back, and pay attention to the interplay between games and
the large-scale processes that shape our world. Finally, we need to
find ways of identifying correspondences between these micro- and
macro-political processes.</p>
<p>The articles in this issue of <em>Fibreculture Journal</em> all
contribute to this project in different ways. They all trace networks
- between fans and academics, between institutions and players,
between technologies and their affordances - but they do so in different
ways, thus demonstrating the strength and flexibility of the network
metaphor. One example that makes the usefulness of a network approach
immediately obvious is Gillian Andrews' article on <em>Dance Dance
Revolution</em> (<em>DDR</em>), which uses Actor-Network Theory
to tease out the often subtle relations between the affordances
of gaming technology, the establishment of vernacular codes of practice,
and cultural domains. Her specific focus is on the interaction between
global and local influences on the dance styles of <em>DDR</em>
players, and it is fascinating to see how arcade machines become
the sites of cultural hybridisation. In the process of linking all
these various factors together, Andrews touches upon questions of
publicity and privacy, cultural hegemony, and the commodification
of play, thus drawing attention to the fact that an aesthetic discourse
is inevitably tied to political questions of visibility, dominance,
and identity. </p>
<p>The
interaction between the global and the local also plays an important
role in the work of Dean Chan, who uses his article to map the cultural
flows between Japan, South Korea, China, and Taiwan in order to outline
the formation of a specifically Asian games culture. He reveals how
traditional notions of 'Asianness' are translated into the new medium
of gaming, and how the localisation of games across borders goes hand
in hand with a renaissance of nationalism. This nationalism not only
informs the production of games that draw on traditional mythology in
East Asia, but also permeates the discourse of players of massively
multiplayer online games. This is evident in the problems that have
arisen due to the exploitation of virtual resources, which is often
seen as the work of Chinese 'immigrants' to virtual worlds. While Chan
is careful not to take the aggressive backlash that 'Chinese farming'
has provoked as a sign of outright racism, he raises serious questions
about what this development may spell for the future of online games
culture. </p>
<p>Further adding to the variety of gaming cultures considered in this issue of <em>Fibreculture Journal</em>, Laurie Taylor explores the fan networks that have developed around the <em>Fatal Frame</em>
series of games, highlighting the importance of fan-created resources
for academic research. She draws attention to the fact that game
researchers depend on sources such as fan websites to understand the
way games become embedded in everyday life. While playing games is an
important way of approaching game culture, researchers often lack the
time and resources to immerse themselves fully in the culture of a
game. Importantly, Taylor also draws attention to the fact that games
research may often involve taking recourse to 'walkthroughs', which is
often considered as a form of cheating. However, an intimate knowledge
of game texts is sometimes simply unattainable without the help of such
extratextual resources, which are themselves subject to a process that
can be compared to academic peer review. At the same time, this
perspective on games makes clear that their textuality is de-centred
and fluid - and that the network metaphor is uniquely suited to account
for these characteristics.</p>
<p>That networks are not immune to ideology is demonstrated by David
Nieborg in his article on the recruitment game <em>America's
Army</em>. Portraying the game as a propaganda instrument, Nieborg
highlights the connections between the entertainment industry, the
U.S. Army, and the Bush administration's War on Terror. It
seems ironically appropriate in the light of American unilateralism
that the game only allows players to play on the side of the Americans,
even when they are perceived by other players as 'enemy combatants',
and vice versa. But Nieborg also draws attention to the way civilian
computing technology is being turned into a military training apparatus,
thus revealing how technicity can feed into the ideological entrainment
of the player. At the same time, the Army's strong stance against
cheating and modding may be read as a sign of a growing awareness
that ideological messages my not be controlled as easily in games
as they are in other media.</p>
<p>While <em>America's Army</em> can be seen as a prime example of
what Kline <em>et al.</em> have called the militarized masculinity
of computer game culture, gender is constructed in an entirely different
way in the culture of casual mobile gaming that Larissa Hjorth studies
in her article. Focussing on the in-game representations of players,
she employs the concept of cute culture to account for the way games
like <em>Kart Rider</em> establish a gendered aesthetics, which
allows her to outline the politics of cuteness that operates in
Asian gaming cultures. Noting that the number of <em>Kart Rider</em>
players has surpassed the number of <em>Lineage</em> players, Hjorth
raises important questions about the future of gaming, and challenges
us to reconsider our assumptions about gaming, gender, and technology.
It is often assumed that gaming will continue to take place predominantly
in the home (or in PC <em>bangs</em>), and that the number of male
players will remain significantly higher than that of female players,
but if we can take the developments in South Korea that she describes
as an indicator, these expectations may turn out to be entirely
off the mark. </p>
<p>Finally, Bo Kampman Walther invites us to imagine an entirely different
future, one in which games blur the boundaries between real and
virtual worlds to an even higher degree than today's games already
do. Looking at the emerging culture of pervasive gaming, Walther
employs the network metaphor to deconstruct Huizinga's notion of
the magic circle of play, which is still prevalent in game studies
today. Pervasive games allow us to see familiar places in a new
light, establishing a virtual topology on top of the real one, and
creating connections between real-world places that may remain invisible
to the naked, un-augmented eye. Walther's description of these multi-layered
spaces as heterotrophic spaces is reminiscent of Foucault's term
heterotopia, and thus draws attention to the fact that space itself
is transformed by political forces. Making these transformations
visible may well be one of the ways in which future game designers
create opportunities for meaningful play. </p>
<p>As the editors of this issue of <em>Fibreculture Journal</em>,
we are pleased to see such diversity in the articles published here.
While there are certainly many aspects of gaming networks that have not
been covered, we hope that these articles will inspire others to follow
the lines of thinking mapped out here, and to connect them with other
perspectives and approaches. In other words, we would like to see that
this collection of papers will itself become a node in a network that
increases the connectivity between people, disciplines and
institutions. As the articles in this issue show, a network perspective
is not tied to a specific discipline or school of thought. It can be
employed by social scientists and humanists, by ludologists and
narratologists, by formalists and nonconformists. Thus, the increased
connectedness of communication systems may work in our favour, opening
up the possibility of a truly transdisciplinary approach to games. </p>
<p>The editors would like to thank the authors for their patience
during the editing process, and the reviewers for their perceptive
comments. Special thanks to Ned Rossiter for coming up with the
idea for this issue, Andrew Murphie for his unfailing support even
in times of crisis and Lisa Gye for making sure it all came together
in the end. </p>
<p> Alice Crawford<br>
Julian Kücklich<br>
Chris Chesher</p>
<p>October 2006 </p><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>"I thought I had reached port; but I seemed to be cast<br>back again into the open sea" (Deleuze and Guattari, after Leibniz)<br><br>Dr Andrew Murphie - Senior Lecturer
<br>School of Media, Film and Theatre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, 2052<br>web:<a href="http://media.arts.unsw.edu.au/andrewmurphie/mysite/index.html">http://media.arts.unsw.edu.au/andrewmurphie/mysite/index.html
</a><br>fax:612 93856812 tlf:612 93855548 email: <a href="mailto:a.murphie@unsw.edu.au">a.murphie@unsw.edu.au</a><br>room 311H, Webster Building