6.

1 How to Interpret Games

SEAN

Up to this point, we’ve given you a few tools for understanding games. We’ve talked about
game mechanics, character development, story structure, emergence, and progression. These
are some of the terms that game scholars use to pick apart a game and interpret its meanings.

LEAH

However, most players don’t sit in front of a running game with a notepad, analyzing and
picking apart the experience. People play games, and play is a complex experience that often
demands someone’s complete attention.

But let’s say that you, the player, did decide to sit there and analyze a game. You’d need some
way of organizing your notes into a coherent idea or argument. And that’s exactly the kind of
research challenge we face in game studies.

We need frameworks that account for the dynamics of the game and the people playing them.
In this lesson we’re going to look at a few different theories that allow us to do just that. These
theories give us ways of gluing together all the different terms we discussed in the previous
lessons.

SEAN

Let’s start by looking at a genre of games that shows us why we need such theories and
frameworks - and that genre is Massively Multiplayer Online games, or MMOs. In the most
popular MMOs there are millions of players interacting in massive game worlds creating new
forms of digital culture. MMOs have attracted all kinds of academics - Sociologists,
demographers, psychologists, economists...even people who study how diseases are spread.

LEAH

I believe the word you are looking for is epidemiologist.

SEAN

Smarty pants. Anyway, many such researchers, including epidemiologists, flocked to MMOs to
understand how virtual cultures work. And how players construct meaning about their
experiences.

QUIZ
Let’s sketch out the problem researchers face in a quick quiz about interpreting games. Imagine
you are a researcher. You want to investigate how World of Warcraft players understand their
experience playing in this massive multiplayer online game. What would you look at
specifically? Would you…

A) Examine how the game rules and procedures constrain player behavior. B) Examine

how the game’s interface hides or exposes certain actions to the player. C) Examine how

the tutorial system gives players the skills they need as they need them.

D) Examine how the guild-structure promotes certain types of player experience over other
types.

E) Examine how language use within the game shapes relationships between players.

F) Any and all of the above.

The most correct answer is F. All these factors, and many others, influence how players
experience games and how they understand those experiences. A researcher seeking to
understand these experiences or a designer seeking to influence these experiences could focus
on any one of these questions. Over the course of this lesson, we’ll try to unpack some of these
approaches. Our goal is to understand and explore how players make sense of the games they
play.

LEAH:

So what is it about MMOs that fascinates researchers? And how did this genre emerge? Let’s
start by talking about Multi-User Dungeons, or MUDs.

MUDs set an early standard for what online role-playing worlds could look like. MMOs were
based on MUDs. But MMOs added two things that MUDs didn’t have: easy-to-use graphical
user interfaces, and popular, recognizable settings.

SEAN

There were several games in the late 1990s that tried to translate the MUD experience into an
MMO. Meridian 59, The Realm, and Dark Sun Online were early attempts. But the first
successful commercial MMO was Ultima Online. It was known as an MMORPG: a massively
multiplayer online role-playing game.
After a period of beta testing with thousands of players in 1996, Ultima Online was released in
1997. It had an enormous community of players many of whom, to this day, still pay a monthly
fee to play.

Ultima Online pioneered or enhanced many of the features that most MMOs now use. Early
versions had a dynamic supply and demand economy as well as an adaptive ecosystem that
governed creature behavior.

The designers of Ultima Online even coined the term “shard”… a term now used to describe
multiple online worlds that offer different experiences or levels of difficulty. On the technical
side, this meant distributing players across many different servers to handle the millions of
players. Almost all MMOs today employ a variant of this technology.

LEAH

It was the social element in Ultima Online, however, that made the game infamous. For the first
year or two, Ultima Online was known as the “wild west” of MMOs. That’s because its designers
were learning how to adapt the game mechanics and balance for hundreds of thousands of
players. Designers would add a feature, and in hours players would find a way to exploit it…
usually for personal gain, and sometimes just to grief other players.

In fact, the word “griefing” came from Ultima Online. Players used it to describe behavior that
intentionally made other players miserable. Imagine logging in to a new, exciting world. You
explore the wilderness, with only a handful of coins and the clothes on your back. A minute
later, you’re dead. Another player has hacked you to pieces and stolen all of your clothes. Just,
you know, because they can.

This kind of griefing became the norm in the early days of UO. Unsurprisingly, players didn’t like
the idea of paying monthly fees to play a game full of cheaters and griefers. Subscribers
dropped quickly. Later MMOs worked hard to correct these problems.

SEAN

There was another important MMO, this one released in 1999: EverQuest. EverQuest added
some important features that Ultima Online lacked.

The most noticeable improvement was its 3D graphics. Publishers were pushing 3D as the latest
and greatest feature that gamers needed. It made 2D games like Ultima Online look archaic in
comparison.

There were also a lot of gameplay differences. EverQuest had a great questing system that
allowed players to complete tasks, which usually involved killing a certain creature. There were
a variety of character races and classes the player could choose from. And a party system
allowed players to complete quests as a group and share the rewards.

However, EverQuest is perhaps best remembered for two far less desirable features. First, it
was here that we really started to see a widespread discussion of video game addiction. And
second, EverQuest saw the first widespread use of real world currency within the game’s
artificial economy. People learned that you could sell in-game items and powerful characters in
auction houses like eBay.

Although the first “gold farmers” were found in UO, the practice became widespread in
EverQuest.

LEAH

Let’s keep in mind that Ultima Online and EverQuest were both RPGs. But, there were other
subgenres of MMOs being made too. And the most widely recognized of those took the world
by storm in 2003: Second Life.

Unlike MMORPGs, Second Life left much of the setting to be determined by the players. Players
explore, socialize, and even own virtual property within the game. Companies, governments,
and universities raced to stake out a claim in Second Life. You could even visit a Swedish
embassy in 2007!

Everyone thought Second Life would be the next big thing, and it certainly was for a while. But
today, most, if not all, of that initial excitement has worn off.

SEAN:

Finally, there is today’s most massive MMOs: World of Warcraft. EverQuest and Ultima Online
succeeded in role-playing circles. But World of Warcraft became a cultural phenomenon.
Released in 2004, World of Warcraft (or WoW) brought together a bunch of different gameplay
styles and combined them into an easy-to-play interface.

The WarCraft fantasy setting – already very popular at the time – lent the game a familiar look.

Like its predecessors, WoW allowed players to connect to different shards or realms. Some
realms have options for player versus player combat...others for pure role-playing...and other
realms are about fighting monsters and finishing in-game quests. All of these realms have their
own cultural styles.

WoW pulled together many features seen in other MMORPGs at the time. It added level
progression and skill trees, a variety of mounts and pets, the ability to create guilds, and the
ability to go on huge multiplayer battles called “raids.”
Put together, WoW created a sociocultural environment that, even today, is rarely found in an
MMO. And today, WoW is still going strong. Millions of subscribers pay a monthly fee to
explore the land of Azeroth. This game “means” a lot to the people who play it.

LEAH:

So in this lesson we’re going to look at “how do games mean?’’ and how do we interpret those
meanings? People who study games borrow interpretive tools from a lot of disciplines. And
then those tools are adapted to study video games. But we have to be careful when we use an
old tool on a new object. And so, we’ll talk about some of the challenges of adapting older
theories and methods to the bright and shiny world of video games.

SEAN

But … just before we get started, we want to say one thing. This is probably the most difficult
section of Understanding Video Games. It deals with some complicated stuff. We tried to make
things as clear as possible, but we’re talking about some pretty complex things. Try to stick with
it. You can always ask for help in the forums if you get stuck.

LEAH:

So, let’s get started.

QUIZ

Let’s have on a quick quiz before we get into specific theories. What do you think the word
“theory” mean for scholars in game studies? Is it…

A) A well tested set of rules that explain the natural world

B) A general framework for understanding human activities

C) A hunch that a series of beliefs might be correct

As we’ll see in a minute, the correct answer is B – a general framework for understanding
human activities. That’s quite a bit different than the way the word is used in the physical
sciences, as seen in answer A, or by everyday people and private detectives, like in answer C.

SEAN
Questions involving meaning in game studies involve thorny issues about interpretation. After
all, how do we pick the right frameworks or theories for interpreting how games mean things?
What kinds of limitations are there with theories and methods?

When we talk about a theory in this course, we don’t mean “theory” in the causal scientific
sense of the word. Natural science theories mean a well-tested, well-substantiated explanation
for some aspect of the material world…like the theory of gravity or the theory of evolution.

In the humanities we use the word “theory” differently. A theory is a framework of abstract
thought. That framework allows for greater understanding of a particular body of knowledge.
So for us, a theory is a general claim that should help explain specific instances. Like a theory,
say, for understanding why people react they way they do to peer pressure … Or why video
games emerged in the 1970s and not the 1940s.

LEAH

You’ve already seen theoretical frameworks in action in this course. In fact, you’ve seen two
examples of the same framework.

Think back to the section on game narrative. Joseph Campbell’s approach to narrative and Elliot
Avedon’s frameworks seem miles apart. But both of them have something in common in their
theories. Their theories share a similar way of looking at the world … a viewpoint that sees
common structures across many different objects of study.

Campbell sees a common “structure” to most myths and legends. The hero is called to action,
the hero ventures forth, and so on. Avedon sees a common structure to all games. Each game
has a purpose, a procedure for action, and so on.

Even though both theorists study different things, we can still loosely group them together.
That’s because their theories both relate human activity to a broader, underlying structure. And
– surprise, surprise – we call this theoretical framework structuralism.