Introduction: 'Levelling Up' and the Impact of Videogames

Introduction: ‘Levelling Up’ and the Impact of Videogames Brittany Kuhn and Alexia Bhéreur-Lagounaris Ask almost any videogame player what it means to ‘level up,’ and they will describe some combination of gaining a certain number of experience points or developing a certain number of skills; the higher the points or skills, the higher the level, the more rewards for the player. If such a concept can be applied to life outside a game, then this 7th Global Videogame Cultures and the Future of Interactive Entertainment at Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom over the weekend of 11-13 September 2015 was just that. And it impacted all of us, leaving no man or woman behind. But how can a conference do that? What was the recipe of this multiplayer levelling? There is a study about this feeling of connectedness and shared interests— Woolley, et al.’s ‘Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups’—which states that: This ‘c factor’ is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group.1 This conference checked off each of those factors: it facilitated an equality in turn taking, there were a higher number of females in the group, and there was a great amount of sensitivity of group members. Even if the level up was something we did not realise until the last day of the conference, it happened in spades. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the videogame as a medium, games studies conferences include scholars from disciplines not often thought to be seen together; this conference was no different. Delegates heralded from areas of philosophy, narratology, computer programming, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, education, graphic design, natural sciences, psychoanalysis, social sciences and economics. Additionally, thirteen countries and four continents were represented, with scholars hailing from Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Switzerland, Malta, Poland, Wales, Scotland, England, Canada, the United States of America, Australia, and Brazil. Of the twenty-two presenters, a full third of the group were females. After the notoriety of the Gamergate scandal the year before, we females felt it was a big level up from the popular representations of women in videogame studies. We were changing the room with more estrogen. Knowing that estrogen comes from the greek oistros, literally meaning “verve or inspiration,” maybe our very attendance contributed to that sense of encouragement and creativity? viii Introduction __________________________________________________________________ An important element to note, also, was that no less than half of the delegates had never presented publicly before, choosing the intimate structure of an Interdisciplinary conference to be their debut. This combination of experienced and inexperienced academics provided a fertile ground for innovative discussion and perspectives. Perhaps the newbies brought with them a type of humility that inexperienced people sometimes have. But this humility was in a specific context: for many of them it was their first time in Oxford and the intellectual aura of this University was also bringing a type of respect or admiration. Or maybe Impostor Syndrome. Or all three! Regardless of the reasons, Mansfield College, with its grand architecture and even grander academic history, invited a kindred spirit to be more attentive and sensitive in their listening, which is why our first presenter was that much more important in setting this open and focused atmosphere. Opening the conference by stating explicitly how videogames fit Danto’s definition of art2 released the rest of us from the need to justify games as a rightful field of academic study. This was a leap into our imagination, a big “What If?” What if we felt we could safely exchange without judgments or justifications to our peers? What if our work could finally be taken seriously? What if we could really change minds—for the better or worse? Accepting the multiple possibilities of what a videogame is, as much as a definition akin to other art forms such as film or photography or dance, triggered a welcoming fertile ground to express each of our own unique perception of what videogames are. There are multiple: sometimes a chef-d’oeuvres, sometimes a yukky crappy plastic flower, sometimes moving, sometimes entertaining, sometimes life changing, sometimes violent but just as complex as art is. And that very first presentation gave us the permission to release our own perceptions. The edited chapters presented in this volume represent only a snapshot of such a ‘levelling up’ of videogame studies. The most prevalent theme revolved around the emotional and moral impacts of contemporary videogames, with specific reference to Bioware’s Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, in particular Dragon Age: Inquisition as it had only been released nine months previously. Yager Entertainment’s Spec Ops: The Line and the episodic games Dontnod’s Life is Strange and TellTale’s Walking Dead were also featured for their use of narrative in the creation of identity as player-character and real-life human being. Other presentations discussed gamer identity in light of the GamerGate scandal in terms of defining and exploring the importance and relevance of ‘fanboy’ subculture, as well as one of its manifestations in the form of Let’s Play videos on YouTube. This idea of videogames reaching into the world outside the game was another common thread amongst the delegation. Many presentations discussed how new technologies in virtual reality and social networking are opening doors for more ‘serious gaming’ in the form of educational games and citizen science. Videogames have become such a cultural mainstay that they are and could be further used to create changes in other fields such as social activism and natural Brittany Kuhn and Alexia Bhéreur-Lagounaris ix __________________________________________________________________ sciences, specifically in reference to the capabilities of crowd-sourcing and community-building in the massive-multiplayer online games EVE Online and World of Warcraft. In-development projects such as Massive-multiplayer Online Science (as described in the included chapter by the same name) and Poland ADL Partnership Lab’s CAMELOT (a military and foreign language training programme) are expanding serious and educational gaming into a new medium. Bethesda’s Skyrim was even given a ‘serious’ look in terms of its use for moral and ethical dilemmas, and Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto V was analysed for its implications on mainstream capitalist marketing practices. Although not all presentations from the conference are included in this volume, the fifteen that have been are carefully divided into three sections: I. Theoretical Impact of videogames II. Individual Impact by videogames III. Social Impact through videogames. These threads were not obviously present at the start of the conference but emerged from a recognition by all in attendance that, for all the seeming disconnect between casual mobile games like Dominaedro and first-person role-playing console games like Mass Effect, all genres and styles of games impact our cultural and professional understandings of how videogames, and our own culture in response, continue to evolve. The first section, entitled ‘Theoretical Impact of Videogames,’ includes four papers that in some way relate to expanding a philosophical, theoretical, structural, or practical understanding of the videogame as a cultural medium. As with any artor entertainment-based medium, the natural beginning is often with philosophy; to this end, Declan Humphreys starts the volume by analysing the ‘usefulness’ of videogames in terms of Aristotle’s philosophical theory of false pleasures and the good life. It seems apt to begin the text with a chapter validating the study of videogames since, as Humphreys writes, the negative criticisms laid upon videogames by political and academic figures are as impacting on the videogame industry as videogames are on society. Thomas Faller continues the use of philosophy through Descartes’ cogito ergo sum and Isaac Asimov’s ‘Three Laws of Robotics’ to discuss how Bioware’s Mass Effect videogame series presents a more-than-likely future of artificial intelligence in terms of their development as slaves, evolution into self-aware and independent beings and the high possibility of their revolt into humanity’s oppressors and antagonists. What Faller argues makes the videogame different from print or cinematic texts, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Gene Rodenberry’s Star Trek: The Next Generation, is the ability of the player to explore the path and events which led to each outcome and learn what not to do when artificial intelligence makes its inevitable appearance in our own society. In the next chapter, Brittany Kuhn moves away from philosophy and into videogame theory through an analysis of the notorious narratology-ludology x Introduction __________________________________________________________________ debate, which has all but stalemated the discipline until recent years. In discussing more contemporary studies which have evolved from that debate, Kuhn argues that it has become more obvious that the player should be at the core of the game experience—both narratively and ludically—rather than the game as a stand-alone object, an idea reflected by the rest of the chapters in this volume. This focus on the ‘ludo-narrative’ is further explored by Kieran Wilson, who discusses the multiple strata on which story is created in modern videogames and how those different strata are expressed ludically and narratively. What’s dually important about this chapter is that Wilson does not just analyse videogames but presents a research methodology which melds the two opposing sides of videogames studies without supplanting one as less important than the other and can be of equal use when analysing all types of games, from casual mobile games to intense first-person role playing console games, as long as they include a story of some kind. Shifting perspectives slightly, the final chapter of this section explores the impact of the player on the videogame in terms of design. Vicente Martin Mastrocola, a designer on the independent Brazilian casual mobile game Dominaedro, provides in-depth analysis for why and how the iterative design process is so important to developing a successful mobile game. As with the other chapters in this volume, Mastrocola comes to the conclusion that understanding and learning from the player experience seems to be what determines whether a game becomes widely successful; a concept more fully explored in the next section. “Individual Impact by Videogames” discusses how contemporary videogames have begun to include more emotionally or morally ambiguous themes, prompting the player to consider their previously held concepts of identity and decisionmaking. Felix Schniz begins this section by analysing how Spec Ops: The Line confronts the player with the cognitive dissonance between the unethical behaviours required of players in first-person war-themed games and the pleasure derived from completing a game, regardless of what the player is asked to do. The three chapters following discuss how Dragon Age: Inquisition (DA:I) represents, reflects or corrupts decision-making and identity-formation through its narrative and non-playable characters. Like Schniz’ chapter, Shauna Ashley Bennis continues a discussion of cognitive dissonance by describing how DA: I helped her recognise how her own identity guided her gameplay and face some serious questions of deciding whether finishing a game should mean compromising one’s principles. René Schallegger uses texts from Canadian studies and postmodernism to explain how DA:I represents the quintessential Canadian identity through the game’s approaches to inclusivity on both a national and a cultural level, while Veit Frick criticises the game’s lack of realistic romantic encounters. Although DA:I is much more inclusive and respectful of the spectrum of gender-identification and Brittany Kuhn and Alexia Bhéreur-Lagounaris xi __________________________________________________________________ sexual preferences, Frick argues that the gameplay itself still lacks a sense of risk in the form of rejection or consequences when approaching a romantic relationship with certain non-playable characters, and such lack of risk may create an unrealistic representation of real-life romance in its more impressionable players. Moving away from DA:I but still within the realm of Bioware, Vanessa Erat gives a post-colonialist reading of the Mass Effect series. She argues that while being inclusive and sensitive to human minorities in terms of race, religion, sex or gender, humanity, as represented in Mass Effect, still subjugates a minority in the form of nonhuman races, stealing their colonies and, in one particularly grim case, committing genocide in the name of the human race. Erat goes on to argue that the lack of player agency in the cases she presents force the player to consider the crimes and consequences of such actions and how contemporary instances of neocolonialism could be avoided. The volume comes to a close with a discussion of serious gaming in the section “Social Impact through Videogames.” These chapters focus on how videogames go beyond the individual in creating a widespread cultural impact, whether it be helpful or hindering. In the first chapter of the section, Attila Szantner presents a developing project which combines the methodology of crowd-sourcing citizen science and the audience of the massive-multiplayer online game EVE Online to become what his group is calling ‘Massive Multiplayer Online Science.’ Alexia Bhéreur-Lagounaris furthers Szantner’s argument in her chapter following, proposing that the future of both citizen science and videogames lies in the development of multiple forms of citizen science gaming, Szantner’s project being only one of many possibilities. As both Szantner and Bhéreur-Lagounaris describe, gaming culture is already rife with player-developed practices in the form of modding (or modifying a computer game’s programming) and fan-created wikipages, and by introducing citizen science methodologies, such practices could be utilised to provide the framework for use in social impact projects. Thomas Hale further explores these fan-made practices with particular attention on the Let’s Play phenomenon and its relevance to the archiving of the videogame experience and development of a ‘gamer’ identity. Bradley James and B.D. Fletcher expand on this idea of fan-created society in defining the ‘Fanboy’ subculture, in both its positive and negative lights. James and Fletcher argue that fanboys, and the misconceptions given about them, are in large part responsible for the marketing boom of the gaming industry. Simon Murphy wraps up this section, and the volume, by bringing the papers full circle in using the philosophical arguments of Baudrillard’s theory of ‘hyperreality’ to discuss the impact and emergent practices of the blatantly satirical capitalist messages of Grand Theft Auto V. However, Murphy goes on to argue that it is the very fan culture, in the forms of modding and hacking, which has further complicated this hyperreality through extortion of the virtual marketplace, forcing developers to create fixes or even entire games which hinder such player creativity. xii Introduction __________________________________________________________________ We only hope that you too, in reading the chapters included in this volume, ‘level up’ your understanding of the cultural impact of videogames, by them, and through them, as we did. We also hope you will ponder and maybe answer the question we all began to ask ourselves as the conference came to an end: with the advent of virtual reality and more advanced social networking technologies, where will videogames, and subsequently our society, ‘level up’ to next? Notes 1 Anita Williams Woolley, et al. “Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups,” Science 330:6004 (Oct 2010): 686-688, accessed 1 May 2016, DOI: 10.1126/science.1193147, PDF. 2 Not included in this collection: David Mizzi, “What Video Games Are: An Application of Danto’s Theory of Art,” paper presented at the 7th Global Conference on Videogame Cultures and the Future of Interactive Entertainment, accessed 9 September 2015, http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/wpcontent/uploads/2015/07/Mizzi_VG7draftpaper.pdf, PDF. Bibliography not added by the editors.