Andrew Phelps is an assistant professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in Rochester, NY. He is the founding faculty member of the Game Programming Concentration within the Department of Information Technology and his work in games programming education has been featured in The New York Times, CNN.com, USA Today, National Public Radio, and other publications. Email: amp-at-it.rit.edu
I started another Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) this weekend, created a new character in the world of Shadowbane. And as I was playing around, I noticed a few things. First, my Everquest hotkeys don't work anymore. Or at least about a third of them, it seems like the designers used a few of the commands, but not others. Thankfully, the ones they did use work the same. But most of my observations went something like this: What do I think about this game and the people I am playing with? It's an interesting experience every time I start one of these games, because its not only a whole new world, its a whole new culture, with a different set of norms.
For example: In Shadowbane, it is apparently OK to loot other people's corpses. In the Everquest community, this is heresy. Everquest operates on a very important principle of 'thou shalt not steal, unless by cheating the game. Cheating the game is ok, just not other players' (I am speaking from the player culture here, I don't really care what Sony Online Entertainment tries to enforce). In Shadowbane, you are silly for not looting someone's corpse, even in the non- player vs. player areas. I got to watch no small amount of drama as this played out for a member of my group, culture shock extreme as the group looted his corpse and wouldn't return his money. It was his fault for dying.
On the whole, I am left with an impression that the folks I am playing with are younger than they are in Everquest. I don't know exactly how I got that sense, though. I don't (yet) have hard numbers on the player community for SB, but I'd be suprised if the average age isn't lower than EQ. Just things people have said, actions in stressful situations, etc. But who can say. The game itself is interesting but lacks the 'old feel' of my beloved Norrath.
I am, by all reasonable definitions, a newborn. I don't know how to communicate, how to get around, how I fit in the societal structure of the world or its player community. A great lesson here to those that feel they are not "set in their ways" - imagine if you could experience the real world again with no knowledge of it - how would you fare?
Lots of press and discussion popping up about cheating in online games, and its effects on the gaming communities in which it happens. The New York Times recently ran this piece, which was an interesting look into the issue, and the wonderful folks over at GameGirlAdvance linked back to the year 2000 piece at the Game Developers Conference on the same topic. All very interesting stuff - but the thing that blew me away was a fairly recent development on the Stormhammer Server of Sony's Everquest Legends.
The names here are removed to protect the innocent, and most of the threads I read this on have now been deleted which is why I [almost] think its ok to talk about. It seems that one of the "guilds" on the Stormhammer server has recently had a moment of crises with it's guild leadership. The group of RL (real life) friends that formed the guild apparently had a very different purpose than those intended by Verant and Sony Online Entertainment. After months of leading the guild on several high-end raids and gaining all kinds of in-game items and loot, this group of friends took those items from the guild vault and sold them on Ebay, and then vanished from the server.
Online identity and trust issues abound. But before you dismiss this as 'oh, well, who really cares about some gold pieces and magic swords that are really just numbers in a database', take a good look at what's happening in online communities of this size. One economic study by California State University at Northridge Professor Edward Castronova placed Norrath (the virtual world of Everquest) as the 77th richest world economy, based on the value of the items in the world adjusted to their value in then-current Ebay auctions. This was reported in WIRED (link above) and several other sources.
So the folks that perpetrated this virtual heist won out with what could have amounted to thousands of dollars in US currency. Now, this is devious, I suppose, but I personally know people who make money starting new characters, powerlevelling them up to god-like status, and then selling them off and starting again. Any cheat program or automated levelling system is just an advantage to reduce the time between character creation and profit on investment. So what makes this different?
In a word, trust. What's interesting as a social phenomenon is the idea that people are willing to sell "virtual relationships" and/or reputation for real world currency. The vault vandals will likely never be able to show themselves on the server again (although they *might* as different characters, which is another interesting issue of online identity), the one thread that holds these communities together is reputation. But in the end, was that worth it? I mean, who cares if you blow off some other folks that play a game - it's not like you *really* stole anything...
The other thing that was fascinating was the speed at which this spread through the community of Norrath. Wildfire doesn't come close to describing it, more like 'instant atomic detonation'. And that's because actions like this strike at the heart of what makes massively-multiplayer games tick - teamwork and collaboration. The games are structured such that in the end-game there really is no solo play. Dragons take 40-70 people to kill, and everyone must work together, even if it is to kill 'the other team' rather than a computer controlled monster. To betray your team is to essentially abdicate from the society. So what makes this so incredibly common? The balance of real-world reward to virtual fame? Fascinating.
The blog is out there, and with it comes mail! Several of you, either in the postings at Slashdot or through personal mail seemed to be asking 'What's the big deal about games, anyway?' (paraphrase is mine, but I think fairly accurate). And the argument is that games are just that: games. Little wastes of time. More than one reader went further to say that games are in fact a drag on the whole of society, that their escapist nature in fact keeps people from being more productive members of society.
Well. First off, you'll get no argument from me that games are escapist. They are. You will, however get argument from me that they don't teach anything. I am involved in two projects that use games and multi-user play-spaces in formal education. These are the Jumping Genes project with the Cornell Theory Center that uses virtual worlds technology to get students together and a game system to help students learn high-school biology (funded by the National Science Foundation, thank you government). The second is the MUPPETS project, which aims at improving the freshman programming experience within the Information Technology program at RIT.
There are also countless websites that document young people finding out more about history or reading books to augment their knowledge about a particular game / time period. They may be good at teaching things like logic and pattern recognition, basic math and spatial orientation. We don't know because no one has studied it (although more and more projects are being proposed. I am also way-overphasizing with the phrase 'no one' as there is a lot of good research there, just not nearly enough). About the only thing I've seen proven is that gaming in children can produce better hand-eye coordination in certain types of specialized situations.
I remember reading 'Gilgamesh' about the same time I was playing 'Bard's Tale' and found more than one connection between the two. I was interested in the Arthurian legend after I was introduced to it in Disney's 'The Sword in the Stone'. [Yes, that was a horrid introduction.] But I found, and read, Le Morte De Arthur by the 5th grade. I got in a fight with my high school English teacher who told me that T. H. White's The Once and Future King was the first recorded version of the tale. And I was already playing Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Might & Magic, and several other RPG's during this time, and recording the parallels between games and between games and fantasy literature, past and present.
All of that was escapist. But I learned how to read and write, how to analyze, how to understand literary reference and derivative work in spite of, not because of, my public education. And I am not alone in that regard. The stereotype that gamers are all an illiterate group of c00l d3wdS just doesn't quite work when you run around a game world and meet Grendel in character (one of my earliest memories of Everquest, about two weeks after launch).
That's not to say there aren't many who fall in to the stereotypical category of slack-jawed 14-hour-a-day addict. It happens, and it shouldn't. But to say this is 'the fault of games' is not entirely true. This happens to people with television. This happens to people with drugs. This happens to people with nearly anything in excess. I have yet to see a multi-conglomerate media company walk into a home in the suburbs of the US and physically chain a child to a gaming console. So I assume they are free to do what they want. And yet my readers were correct, some of them (though not all, and let's not mince words, no one seems to have any really solid research on exact numbers) fall directly into a very dangerous play-pattern.
But let's explore an interesting idea that I was discussing with some friends the other day (my friends are parents, I am not). It seems to me that one of the reasons that our children are "wasting" so much of their lives in virtual game-worlds is because we are not providing other things for them to do. I mean that very seriously. In my community, sports teams are limited in number, with thousands of students attending a single high-school. Unless you are very very good at a sport, you won't make the team.
When I grew up, I hung out every summer at a neighborhood pool - but they don't have those any more because of the cost of insurance for such an establishment. I also hung out at a pizza place around the corner from my school, but they tore that down because the drug-dealers started going there to sell their stuff to the students. The community I grew up in had a 9pm curfew that no one under 18 should be out past then without a parent, and many towns and villages are resorting to this kind of thing to prevent 'unwanted activity'. You can't be in a public park after dark either.
Children don't go to work in either family businesses (which are fewer and fewer), nor do they go to work to help support their families as in the past. These are small-scale examples but they speak to a larger societal issue: we have taken away nearly all of the "traditional" past-times of children and replaced them with television [first - pre 1985] and games [second - post 1985]. And we (the older community) have made little to no effort to understand games, only shoved our children in front of them and said 'don't bother me'. Is it any wonder that there are now mini-vans with game consoles built into the back seat? I haven't seen a solid response as to what, exactly, our children are supposed to be doing, just "not those games".
Because much of society doesn't want to get involved with games or understand them, very few parents actually understand the rating system. They assume, wrongly, that if something is a game, then it must be ok for children. This could be because the stereotype of the very word 'game' implies that it is for kids - but only in our society: we do not think of Go-Mo-Ku being only for children, in fact the image that is conjured into my mind is one of tribal elders playing on the temple steps. When did 'game' get reduced to 'Shoots & Ladders' ? (Go Mo Ku originated in China some 4000 years ago and is, I think, the earliest known 'game'... fascinating that so many of us regard the escape of gaming as 'new').
My friend Liz is an exception - she plays the first few rounds of games with her boys, and thus understands what they are doing with their time. She also helps them monitor their day - making sure they don't 'just sit there and game all day'. Then again, despite her protests, Liz is a gamer too, just take one look at her Palm Pilot. She may not subscribe to the male-dominated war game scenarios, but she does enjoy games along a fairly classic pattern of puzzle solving and timed strategy, from Magic: the Gathering to Pokemon. (and Animal Crossing, which I haven't figured out yet).
But it seems a lot of our society is perfectly willing to abdicate responsibility for our offspring for large periods of time, and then scream that we don't understand their culture. Gaming-culture is infused with this anti-mainstream and anti-establishment ethos, because it springs in part from the desire to not fit in with the cultural norms of our larger society that have been, in part, denied the gamer for whatever reason.
There is a fundamental emotion that makes us (as adults) angry at games. That emotion is fear. You can see this fear reflected in Henry Jenkins experiences with the US Congress. You can see that fear in court rulings that circumvent the First Amendment. All because no one is willing to do what my parents did - sit down and play some of the games with their children and understand them, make intelligent decisions, and enforce parental oversight.
I'm sure I'll get some hate-mail here. I am not denying horrible acts like the virtual rape that occured here. I am denying that that is the part and parcel of games as culture. When I was at the GDC there was someone (and I'm very sorry I don't remember who) who said "As with every other medium, the first forays into the medium concentrated on violence. Violence is easy, and it always appeals to something in mankind. We are already seeing games that rise above violence as their major component. Hopefully, there will eventually be all manner of games, just as there are all manner of films, some of which are violent and mindless, but some of which are beautiful and soft." Don't believe the part about violence in mankind? Re-read Gilgamesh.
The thing that is very very dangerous is the idea that somehow games are escapist and should therefore be cut-off. Escapism is nothing new to society. Stories are escapist. Movies are escapist. In fact, if we want to be technical, plays are escapist and by extension the so-called pinnacle of human literary expression, William Shakespeare, is escapist [regardless of who you think actually wrote them, I'm sticking with convention and calling them "his" plays].
We make great strides to understand the nuance of drama, Shakespeare, art, creative writing, etc. but when I go to meeting on campus and introduce myself I sometimes get 'oh, you are that gaming guy' and the eyes glaze over in the assumption I will have nothing interesting to say. (Interestingly, this also happens in some technical circles, but that is changing more rapidly as at least the technology of games is being recognized, if not their content).
I could argue that Missile Command is a telling tale of the fear of a collective society in a Cold War trying to cope with a threat of nuclear Armageddon, that young people flocked to arcades to have some outlet for the anger at not having a future other than as disassociated sub-atomic particles. But instead, we argue that games are somehow different, more vile, and less worthy of our attention.
Society has always had escapism - it is a necessary and integral part of any human society (go look at societies that have tried to suppress it... you may not like the result). You can see this in the jousting tourneys of England, professional sport, the bardic tales of pre-recorded history, the original Olympiad, The Golden Age of Hollywood, etc. [Interested readers might want to check out Hamlet on the Holodeck by Janet Murray as an interesting look at the parallels in literary work with modern day muds and games]. In our present day culture, we have more time devoted to leisure as a whole, and so to me it is not suprising that we spend more time inworld... we are not out hunting and gathering all day to feed the tribe. If we disapprove of our children spending time online, what are their alternatives?
Oh, and by the way, the average age of electronic game players across all genres is 28.
1. The Size of the Industry: It’s bigger than you think it is.
The current computer games industry (which refers to computer games, console (ie game machine titles, on-line games and arcade games but not the ‘gaming industry’ which refers to gambling in all its forms, electronic and otherwise) turned an annual profit in the United States last year of $6.65 billion on software alone.
While that figure is staggering, it does little to truly represent the size of the industry. If hardware sales are included in that figure, then the figure jumps to approximately $15 billion. (Note that “hardware” here is defined as game “consoles” like Microsoft’s XBOX and Sony’s PlayStation, and hand-held game systems like the Nintendo Game Boy. It’s difficult to determine how much of the PC market is directly tied to games, however it is clear that people who buy machines primarily or exclusively for games buy the highest-end, and therefore most expensive, machines. There are third party computer manufacturers who target the game market and build and sell high end machines to these consumers exclusively.)
If the world market is calculated, that figure jumps to approximately 3 times that number. (Most notably the inclusion of Japan and the European Union, as well as Australia, makes the most significant impact on the projection of industry size and growth). As an example, Christmas of 2002 saw hardware-only sales of $7.4 billion worldwide.
While many assume that the majority of the market is in PC-Based titles, the bigger piece of the market lies in console-based games. Consoles far outstrip the PC market, as there is a gaming console of some kind in 1 out of every 3 homes in North America, and a Sony Playstation® in 1 out of every 5.
Nor does the preponderance of console titles and the manufacturers’ influence seem historically based in the price point between computers and consoles. Market penetration of console hardware is at an all time high, while software titles cannot seemingly be released fast enough for a hungry audience. Sales of games and game related paraphernalia continue to grow each year despite economic downturns in nearly every other market segment across the board. There have been brief dips in profit and product viability after specific recent events like Columbine and September 11th, however none of these have had a substantial impact on the overall growth curve of the industry.
Nor are these trends considered transitory as there is a 70% growth rate projected for this industry over the next 10 years. There are, to be sure, different growth patterns depending on the analytical tools used for the projected model, but nearly all of the forecasts agree on staggering potential growth as the market for electronic entertainment continues to expand. Games are becoming, in a very real sense, the medium of the 21st century, if only by sheer volume.
2. Breadth of the Industry: Not everything dies.
Perhaps more important than understanding the size of the industry, is gaining an understanding of its breadth and scope. ‘Computer Games’ in all their various forms are in fact quite complex, and serve as a rich and colorful form of entertainment to several different audiences and come in a variety of genres.
While the popular press generally covers games in their basest and least societally acceptable form – the First Person Shooter games of Quake and DOOM, there are in fact several genres of games that are completely non-violent, other games that are violent only in their recreation of historical events, and many that operate on a system of strategy and cooperation that has little to do with the stereotypical ‘cave-hermit’ that plays games all day because of failed real-world attempts at social interaction. Also interesting is that while the media likes to categorize game players as caffeine twitching teenagers strung out on pizza and Mountain Dew, in fact the average game player today can be anywhere from 5 to 65, with an average age of 28 across all genres. Interestingly, the most popular games of the last 20 years have not been first-person shooters, they have been outsold and outclassed by games such as The Sims, Railroad Tycoon, Crash Bandicoot, and Sonic the Hedgehog.
WIRED reported recently that the SuperMario franchise has made more over the years than the Star Wars films. Going back to the Golden Age of the Arcade, it wasn’t Space Invaders or 1942 that crowded kids into malls and Chuck-e-Cheezes – the game at the time was Pac-Man, and its ever more popular spin-off, Mrs. Pac-Man. Hardly a feast of violence, even at the time.
If one is to truly understand games and how they fit into society, it is first necessary to recognize the breadth of differentiation between various types of games, and to understand that games are a nascent medium, still growing both in terms of the technology used to build them, and the possibilities of user experience afforded by that underlying expansion.
Throughout this blog, references to different games and game types (as above) will be used. In studying the types and genres of games, this author identified at last count approximately nine different genres within the overall classification of ‘computer games’, as part of the process in preparing an academic text on the subject, each of which exhibit several different sub-genres and overlapping issues.
3. The Medium of Modern Culture
If one looks carefully at the breadth and depth that games exhibit today, and combines this with the fact that games are still very much a growing medium that has only blossomed in the last 20 years or so, it is apparent that games are quickly becoming the mass-medium of a new modern culture. The game console is already replacing the television as the focal point in many American and Japanese households, and is also being retooled to serve as an Internet gateway for the family. Games are moving online, because at their core games are a social exercise, a way to spend time with friends and family.
The rise of games, the stereotypical press coverage, the misunderstandings of their nature, the scapegoat quality that is currently used to explain acts of violence is all similar in nature to the birth of Hollywood and the film industry. If one studies carefully the medium of film and its rise as both an academic endeavor as a technical and artistic discipline, as well as a medium of communication, many of these same issues were (and sometimes still are) very much in the foreground.
As an interactive medium games separate themselves from film in their real-time nature, the interactivity afforded by the medium, the personalization that players feel as they are immersed in the game world, and the communication that is afforded through multiple players. Where film is a passive experience, games are active.
Nonetheless, there is a large overlap between the study of film and the study of modern computer games. The study of film in academia has been bifurcated into two disciplines; the study of film as a technical means to produce moving pictures and all of the subsequent technological advances, and the study of film as an artistic medium of storytelling and expression.
In repeated and impassioned pleas at the Game Developers Conference, both technologists and artists expressed their sincere belief that it would be a mistake of gigantic proportion should this be allowed to happen to the study of games. Games are dependent on both their technological underpinnings and the playability and story of the game to succeed, and to separate the study of one form the other is to deny the academic a solid understanding of the whole.
4. What is this Blog ?
This blog is about tracking the rise of games as a medium of popular culture, and perhaps the medium of the times. The Jones’ kids all have game consoles, but more and more it’s not just Saturday morning entertainment - games are impacting peoples lives in a way never seen before. There are fan sites, art books, academic theses, and a massive entertainment industry all waking up to the fact that these things are a lot more important than we gave them credit for. Already games are under fire as the evil corrupting the youth: a place formerly reserved for the likes of Rock’n’Roll, Hollywood or Ragtime (depending on your era). This blog is about watching the emergence of a medium, right before our very eyes.
What this blog is focused on:
1. Emerging Gaming Technologies. Games are moving to the wired world, using a variety of techniques, from the MMORPG to the personal 1-cent game of cell-phone chess on the subway ride to work. The technology continues to expand and grow, and with it the possibilities of the medium. Game technology is growing at a rate that dwarfs the innovation in the film and music industries. The very limits of what is feasible are still expanding exponentially.
2. Emerging Social Phenomena Surrounding Games. Online communities are turning out to be as important, or more important, than the content of the games themselves. Media companies are being suddenly faced with the puzzle of thousands of connected consumers that talk and play with each other. Games survive and succeed on word-of-mouth and the community behind them. Game communities are exhibiting more and more complex behavior with regard to member status and player rights. Games themselves are changing to models that put real power in the hands of these communities, the power to create for themselves the games they want. The issues of identity, privacy, collaboration, communication and expectation in the on-line world are becoming part and parcel with the games community and its inner workings.
3. Emergence of Games as a Societal Medium. How are games *really* affecting us? We’re spending an increasingly large percentage of our time in game-worlds and fantasy places, what does this mean? Almost no one, it seems, is doing any real research on how this affects either our youth or ourselves. The academic community is only just now waking up to the fact that games are a dominating force in popular culture and driving an entire technological sector – perhaps because of the stigma of the term ’games’ – which implies a simple waste of time. Are games reflecting modern culture, or shaping it ? Is society ready to accept the importance of how we play and what „games“ really mean in the larger sense? What are the social and cultural issues affecting the games community? Gender? Age? Digital Divide?
4. Emergence of Games in Academia. As the world wakes up and looks around at games with a newfound sense of respect for their importance, one place that is slowly getting over its initial stigma of the study of games is the Ivory Tower. What this means is that there may finally be a place for the critical research of „what makes a good game?“ and a host of other questions to which now the current best answer is „I know it when I play it“. There is a slowly amassing literature and body of knowledge of games and their players which deserves careful consideration and study but which is still stifled by fragmentation and disagreement dating back to the birth of the medium. While many seem happy to apply gaming technologies to ‚more serious problems’ – few are the number of researchers willing to tackle games as they are, to explore their importance and their ramifications. But that number is growing.
5. What this blog is not.
A Game Review Site. There are plenty of places to go read reviews of new games. While this blog may occasionally refer to some new game to point out an interesting point relative to the goals above, rarely will it feature a simple review of a game and say‚ this is good, go buy it’ or some such. More important to us are games that break new ground, be they good or bad, successful or not.
A Game Technology Site. We will discuss technology, in terms of what it affords, how that impacts the community, what it means and how it affects any number of issues. I do not plan to write, here, how it works. There are several sites devoted to programming games and building / modding hardware. While I teach game programming, and while that is certainly part of making games, the focus here is not on how the technology works, but what it means when it does.
Andrew Phelps is an assistant professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in Rochester, NY. He is the founding faculty member of the Game Programming Concentration within the Department of Information Technology and his work in games programming education has been featured in The New York Times, CNN.com, USA Today, National Public Radio, and other publications. Email: amp-at-it.rit.edu
