Exam 4

Day 24

The 2000s: Console Wars, part two

o 1998: Sega releases the Dreamcast
o 2000: Sony releases the Playstation 2
o 2001: Sega abandons console production
o 2001 Microsoft releases Xbox
o Video games in Japan fall throughout the 1990s and 2000s;
o 2002: North America passes Japan as the worlds largest
consumer of video games;
o 2009: the UK passes Japan for the #2 spot.
o Nintendo, far more vulnerable than Sony or Microsoft to
these pressures, decides to stop chasing the technological
leading edge.
o 2004: Nintendo releases the DS
o 2005: Microsoft releases Xbox 36
o 2006: Nintendo releases the Wii, which becomes the
bestselling game console of the decade
o 2006: Sony releases the PS3
o By late 2009 Nintendo had sold 68 million Wiis, about twice
as many as the Xbox 360 and the PS3. As is always the
case when there is a substantial expansion of the video
game industry, much of the Wiis success was based on its
ability to attract female players.
o 2012: Wii U
o 2013: Xbox One, PS4

The 2000s: User-generated content

The 2000s see a really significant rise in user-generated content for
games, from level-builders (remember that the earliest level-builder
was in Brderbunds Lode Runner (1983). But the release of levelbuilders in games like Doom, and then the release of user-generated
online content (photo albums) in The Sims (2000), led to a large
expansion of user-generated content, from work that was completely
integrated into the game (skins, etc.) to external content (tutorials,
machinma, etc.). In 2005, Peter Molyneux releases The Movies
The 2000s: Machinima
What we see beginning with the modding community around Doom,
and then extended both in and outside games, is the extension of the
tools of content creation to users. For some games these amount to

the production of new items within diegetic space (clothes, creatures,

houses, etc.); for others these amount to new levels or geographic
spaces within the games (levels in Doom, Neverwinter Nights,
LittleBigPlanet, and so on). This leads to machine cinema, aka
machinima..
o 1996: Diary of a Camper (set in Quake) is the first machinima
film.
o 2002: First machinima film festival held at QuakeCon; winner is
Anachronox: The Movie
o 2005: The Movies (2005, Peter Molyneux) is the first game to be
entirely structured around tools for machinima.
o 2005: This Spartan Life, talk show hosted in Halo space:
o 2007: HBO purchases rights to Molotov Alva and His Search for
the Creator
We need to think of machinima (and fan fiction) as part of a much
longer history of rewritings and remediations (or just mediations) of
popular texts, which we see as early as oral narrative, and in
interesting examples like Don Quijote (1604).
The 2000s: Beyond machina, conceptual and visual art
o Cory Arcangel is a contemporary video artist who has made a
number of works that repurpose video games and other material.
o Super Mario Clouds (2002)
o Paganinis Fifth Caprice
o Sorry I Havent Posted
o Various Self-Playing Bowling Games (2011)
o The Chinese artist Feng Mengbo has made a number of
video-game inspired works, including The Long March
The 2000s: Two major formal trends
o We can identify two major formal trends in the PC video game
scene in the 2000s:
1. A general shift towards complex narrative in a wider array of
genres.
o We see this especially in the shift in FPS games from
narratively quite simple (Doom, Quake) to much more
complex and rich storytelling, as in the Half Life or
BioShock series.
2. A general shift towards openness (and therefore
completeness) in gameplay, which we can see in game-paths,
worlds, and game physics.

o This is especially visible in games like Morrowind (2002) or

Oblivion (2006) or Skyrim (2011), or Fallout 3 (2008), all
made by Bethesda; or in RPGs made by BioWare, especially
the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series.
The games that bring together these two trends with the greatest
ntensity are Grand Theft Auto III (2001, Rockstar Games) and GTA IV
(2008) and V (2013-15)
Day 25:

Indie Games
o So, as I suggested in class last week, one of the significant
changes in the game industry in the last decade is the
much cheaper access to what Marxists would call the
means of cultural production, meaning the tools and
distribution networks you need to actually produce and sell
culture.
o This produces an immense rise in the production and
availability of what are known as indie games, meaning
games that are made independently of any major game
studio/company.
o Indie games are designed both by individual game
designers (like Jonathan Blow, who made Braid, or Jenova
Chen, who made Flow and Flower) as well as by small
studios like Amanita Design (Czech Republic), makers of
Machinarium, or Metanet Software (Canada), makers of
N+.
o A number of indie games are simply smaller and/or highly
addictive and fun platformers, like N+; others are
compelling puzzle-based games like Limbo (2006, made by
the Danish studio Playdead), using highly unusual visual
language and storytelling to create compelling
experiences.
o Lets spend a bit of time looking at gameplay from three of
IGNs top 15 indie games of 2013, to give you an idea of
the range of possibilities here. Some games, like The
Stanley Parable (Galactic Cafe, 2013), are using highly
original narrative structures of the type never before seen
in video gaming.

Jason Rohrer, Chain World

9 Rules of Chain World
1. Run Chain World via one of the included run_ChainWorld
launchers.

2. Start a single-player game and pick Chain World.

3. Play until you die exactly once.
3a. Erecting wooden signs with text is forbidden
3b. Suicide is permissible.
4. Immediately after dying and respawning, quit to the menu.
5. Allow the world to save.
6. Exit the game and wait for your launcher to automatically copy
Chain World back to the USB stick.
7. Pass the USB stick to someone else who expresses interest.
8. Never discuss what you saw or did in Chain World with anyone.
9. Never play again.
Day 26:
McGonigal, Reality is Broken
These chapters continue McGonigals emphasis on the various ways in
which the kinds energy devoted to gaming point us to better/more
interesting ways to organize reality.
The two main themes involve
1. Using game-structures to motivate positive social activity (via
crowdsourcing or gamification)
2. Recognizing the power of collaboration, and using game-structures
to increase collaboration around nongame activities.

McGonigals major examples of the power of crowdsourcing

include Wikipedia (100 million work-hours, est.), Folding@Home,
and FreeRice. She claims that Wikipedia succeeds in attracting
participants because it is structured like an MMORPG. This strikes
me as simpleminded. Nonetheless shes right that the internet
has enabled an economy based on the sharing of individually
worthless resources (unused processing time, or spare time for
people), and that such an economy can have powerful effects.
Also worth pointing out that, as weve noted before, the
capitalization of individually worthless resources is also how
companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google make their
money.

What are the limitations of crowdsourcing?

-Studies show that paying people to participate in crowdsourced tasks
(like Amazons Mechanical Turk,
https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome) reduces participation and
emotional engagement. To improve reality, we would need to create
forms of engagement that people want to participate in.

Cooperation
McGonigal argues that games, even antagonistic games, are
essentially about cooperation, since they require players to act
together to maintain the magic circle that includes the game
rules, the game-world, and so on.
This sounds amazing until you realize that under these conditions
a war between two countries is also cooperative, and so is, say,
the relationship between terrorists and governments.
In any case however this highlights the degree to which
collaboration and cooperation matter to gaming, and points the
way to the possibility of enhancing reality by creating more
opportunities for them.
Here we might want to remember that players collaborate and
cooperate every time they engage in metaculture, whether
instrumental (sharing cheats, writing walkthroughs) or expressive
(fan fiction, etc.). Indeed you might think of the social as a giant
arena for collaboration and cooperation (as well as, of course,
griefing and antagonism and mindless cruelty).
But heres whats really interesting:
The internet makes it clear that people are willing to do lots of
work for very little money, and only minimal social recognition.
Lets recognize that as part of what the internet makes possible,
because among other things it actually changes our sense of
what humans are like.
The question is how we can take advantage of that newfound
knowledge in ways that make life better, not just in terms of the
number of hilarious cat videos (or culture more generally) but in
ways that reach beyond aesthetic culture.
So lets talk about education
So one thing thats clear is that people are moved and motivated by
various forms of online culture, including games. One of the things I
worry about is what this means for teaching. The general version of the
problem McGonigal addresses for us is, If video game culture is so
much more compelling than regular life, what will happen if people
simply withdraw from regular life?
The more particular version is this: How are you supposed to teach
people (in school) when their major positive experiences of
engagement are so differentand so much more compellingthan the
ones that school provides?
Ok, and because I love Jason Roher

A game he made a couple years ago: The Castle Doctrine. Lets

start by looking at the trailer:
http://thecastledoctrine.net/buy.php
And consider this comment from YouTube:
o After seeing you play this game previously, I bought it
myself. But after making a fairly successful house I just
couldn't cope with the constant fear that I might be robbed
even when not playing. It turned into this sort of waking
nightmare where I knew that at any moment I could loose
everything I had worked the past couple of days to
achieve. And someone might break my house so bad that
my plans would become so transparent that I would have
to change everything and start from scratch. And I would
worry so much about my wife that I would be relieved
when someone finally killed her, so that it would be one
less thing to worry about

DAY 27:
McGonigal and Gottschall
Both McGonigal and Gottschall recognize, in different ways, the
vast power of the psychological tendency to think positively.
Gottschall is careful (unlike McGonigal) to emphasize that
positive thinking as it is projected both backwards and forwards
tends to be highly unrealistic. That lack of realism is in fact
psychologically necessary:
William Hirstein:
The truth is depressing. We are going to die, most likely after illness; all
our friends will likewise die; we are tiny insignificant dots on a tiny
planet. Perhaps with the advent of broad intelligence and foresight
comes the need for selfdeception to keep depression and its
consequent lethargy at bay. There needs to be a basic denial of our
finitude and insignificance in the larger scene. It takes a certain
amount of chutzpah just to get out of bed in the morning.
Reality: broken, but, necessary
And so we come back to the basic McGonigal questions, which we can
now connect to Gottschall: given that much of the time stories and
games are better than realitymore engaging, more compelling,
more absorbing of our attention and energy, and more likely to push us
to work on their behalf:
1. What is the future of reality as an anthropological field?
2. What can we do to make that future better (freer, safer, fairer)?
And now more personally

McGonigal argues that god and 4x games encourage players to

think long-term, and says that long-term thinking is key to saving
the planet.
But of course the balance between long- and short-term thinking
is much more central than that. We have historically relied on the
overall work of the system (lots of people behaving selfishly and
short-term = good results [this is Adam Smiths famous invisible
hand]). And yet we know (and research shows) that the ability
to resist short-term gain for long-term benefit is a major factor in
personal development and happiness (see Walter Mischel, The
Marshmallow Test).
We also know that for many of you games are the short-term
problem, and life is the long-term one. That is, instead of games
orienting you toward long-term goals, they seem to push away
long-term goals (because, as McGonigal has it, reality is
broken; see also Edward Castronova, Exodus to the Virtual
World.)

Hayots advice for smart young people

1. The most important thing you can do in college is study abroad.
2. If you can afford it, study for five years, and use the extra time to
study abroad, do a second major, and take lots of courses outside your
existing fields of interest.
3. Practice sustained attention to difficult things, especially to things
that are not as immediately engaging as video games.
4. Establish goals (personal, educational, professional) and evaluate
yourself regularly. Are you the person you want to be? What can you do
to become that person?
5. Dont beat yourself up over small failures; apologize (to yourself if
necessary), move forward, and understand that failing just means
youre trying to do something hard.
6. Try harder than youre trying to be nice to people, even when you
feel unhappy or afraid. Most other folks are unhappy and afraid too.
7. Your life belongs to you. Ask yourself what people will say about you
on your deathbed, and write the story that you want them to tell.